Tanks but no tanks

A couple of thoughts, based on this Politico piece that Sven provided in the comments on the previous post:

1. For a dude who claims to luuuuuurve his military guys El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago has no problems with making at least some of the poor bastards work over the holiday weekend rather than hang out at home or drink with the guys in the billets. I wonder who drew the short straw down in Ft. Stewart to drag ass all the way to D.C. to babysit the Brads and tanks and the M88 so somebody who would rather not have dragged ass to Southeast Asia when he had the chance (cough!bonespurscough!) could pose with the heavy metal and get a little woody?

2. There's a big reason that the Fourth isn't like Bastille Day.

For all that both republics were born in war and the use of force, the U.S. deliberately pushed the troops back into the barracks - hell, the Founders and Framers didn't want "troops" in the sense of regular GIs at all - in a way that France did not. And, in part because of that the U.S. has been spared the sort of man-on-horseback problems France has had with it's armed forces. There's a reason we here revere George Washington; for all his flaws (and he had them, like all of us) he could easily have been Napoleon and consciously turned away from that.

It's a sad comment - not so much on Trump, who is a ginormous toddler with the soul of a cinerious lump of coal and the intellect of a howler monkey who can only be expected to crave the fake toughness of being close to soldiers and military hardware, but - on the state of this nation that the vast bulk of Americans are reacting to this ridiculous Red Square propaganda show with vast indifference.

I'm sorry I'm 3,000 miles away, because somebody owes those 3rd ID guys a beer for having to be part of this Reichsparteitag shit, and I'd be buying.

And someone owes Trump a finger, while they're at it, and I got one of those for his orange ass, too.

We petty men

Tomorrow is the Tin Anniversary of the Third Gulf War.



I wish I had something to post better than Charlie Pierce, but I don't. So I will merely direct you to his scathing reminder that we petty men will - now and forever - creep between the broken legs of the statue in Firdos Square and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.

The war may have killed thousands but completely spared the lives and even the public careers of the wretched, greedy, cowardly liars that summoned it from the depths of the Eblis of national fear, violence, and hubris. And we have chosen to accept that without demur. That is our shame. That is our crime; not that we committed the wrong but that we did not punish it when we saw that it was wrong.

The persistence of these Tin Gods in the public life of our nation is, and should be, a great enduring unbearable shame to us, all of us, us the We the People who were entrusted with the honor and truth of this nation. We have chosen to be a nation of Men rather than a nation of Law, chosen comfortable dishonor above painful rectitude, chosen the deaths of others rather than to sacrifice ourselves.

When our generation is remembered it should be for that, and for that above all. Whatever good we have done, whatever kindnesses we may do, the crimes for which we hung the defeated leaders of Nazi Germany, the crime of making aggressive war, the "crimes against peace" of Nuremberg; the crimes of others that by our acceptance and indifference we have made our own, will remain with us always. Like the unquiet ghosts of the dead of Baghdad, Ramadi, and Basra, like the mournful fragments of the GIs flown home inside plastic sacks, and like the cries of the headscarved women, weeping for sons and fathers and lovers vanished in the morning mists that rise above the Tigris as the merciless dawn floods the watermeadows with light as red as blood.

Quis Custodiet?

I kinda hate to keep hammering on this nonsense.



It probably bores the hell out of you like any other family feud and I admit that it really is a sort of military "inside baseball"; of interest only to the sort of people who keep stats and obsessively squirrel away bizarre trivia about obscure minor leagues.

But, like jock itch, this story gets to me in particularly tender places.

And, kidding aside, I think it says some things that concern me about my country and my armed forces. So I apologize, but I'm gonna vent a little here.

One is the irritating nature of the "Global War on Terror" as presented to, and accepted by, the U.S. public.

Ever since 2002 I've thought that the most ominous part of the various wars and quasi-wars and secret wars we've been fighting (largely in the unpaved portions of Asia and Africa) is the way they have been almost completely removed from and independent of public opinion and public purview. The U.S. public as a whole neither pays a price nor has an interest in what their soldiers are doing in the less paved parts of the world under the auspices of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force.

I could go over why this isn't a good idea, the multiple reasons that cabinet wars and imperial expeditions are not in the best interests of a democracy. The inevitable erosion of liberal governance and the expansion of executive power that occur in wartime. The moral and intellectual hazard of accustoming a people to continual, low-grade expeditionary wars (without immediate costs or consequences to the people bankrolling the wars). The bad habits that governments, troops, and citizens pick up whilst committing mayhem in places to other peoples without either seeing or feeling the effects of the mayhem themselves.

We've effectively turned these damn wars into a third-person shooter game, complete with it's own fucking music video and all, for God's sake. And - although largely unwilling to join the fight ourselves and uncaring about the real people who do - we've turned our pixellated images of them into cartoonish heroes, ridiculously inflated and lionized "warriors" for what should be a warrior-free zone: an industrial democratic republic.

So this "Shooter" has become, for me, a living version of the crayon-drawing of a modern American "warrior" that We the People seem to want; imputed with unlikely and improbable virtues, excused all critical assessment, feted and fetishized and blown up beyond the reality of what soldiers have always been. Your neighbor's idle brother, the smart kid behind the counter at the convenience store, the nice guy your sister dumped because "he was boring", the knucklehead who cut you off at the freeway on-ramp.

What especially got to me on this subject was the fawning reaction this Shooter got when he and his cronies stopped off on Capitol Hill (see the first link above), where the people who should have been his fellow citiens and notional governmental superiors treated him like a bunch of gushing fangirls and fell all over him to praise his work which is, at bottom, no more than any other infantryman has been asked to do in this endless farkling about in central Asia only with fancier kit and more secrecy.

This basically irks the shit out of me, this whole business about fellating the "warriors" and bumper-sticker patriotism and endless painless videogame wars. I don't think it's healthy for a republic and I don't think it's a smart thing for us as the notional sovereigns of the United States to be doing to ourselves.

And this "Shooter" has become the poster child for all of my irritation with my fellow citizens.

The other problem I have with this story is what I think it says about a troubling development within my Army and the U.S. ground troops in general, by the way one of the guys from one of the Navy's Special Operations outfits feels about the rest of the Navy and (by inference) the other military outfits he is forced to share the battlefield with.

The magilla with this Shooter has been his loud complaints about how tough it is to be him, how tough the Special Operations outfits have it, and how - because of that - he and they deserve special consideration; early retirement pension vestment and special benefits if they ETS before they earn their retirement.

By publicly agitating for special privileges for the Special Operations forces - and only the SOF - this Shooter is taking a fire axe to this weak join between the SOF and the line units. By publicly demonstrating his contempt for the guys in the Navy Choir, for the line squids on the carrier decks and in the Stores warehouse at Norfolk this Shooter is fueling the fire of resentment and irritation that these guys, many of them, probably feel for him and his high-speed brethern.

One of the reasons that the U.S. Army and the other U.S. services have been so competent and successful tactically is that they have always been good at working together as a team. Every element in the team; the combat, combat support, and combat service support units, and individuals, recognize their mutual dependence. The guy who kicks down the door depends on the helo driver overhead who depends on the avionics tech back at the FOB who depends on the guy loading the supply truck back at the Corps rear who depends on the PAC clerk working the computer back at Ft. Ben Harrison back in the States. Who, for God's sake, depends on the guy in the 82nd Chorus singing at some fucking high school in Cornhole, Iowa to get the kids all excited about volunteering for the Army.

And one reason all those people work together is the understanding that they're all in the same Army; they all - although some get a little more money and some get to wear some cooler uniforms - get the same basic deal.

They HAVE to work together to win, and the way the service treats their service recognizes that fact. The door-kicker doesn't succeed if the PAC clerk fucks up his pay, his allotment doesn't get to his family, their e-mails get him all fucked up and so that night he's thinking about his sick daughter's not getting TRICARE instead of the people who might be behind the door with a nasty surprise for him and his team.

But the Shooter doesn't care, or probably doesn't even know, about this. And because of that he's busy kicking in a door that I don't think, either as a soldier or a U.S. citizen, we want to open. It does and will do us no good to make our special operations units a sort of Special Republican Guard, and the example of the originals should tell us so.

There's always an entropy in military organizations that works around eliteness. The elites can easily start looking down on everyone else with contempt and everyone else starts envying and resenting the elites.

In Third World armies this can cripple the organization; the Iraqi Republican Guard was a classic of the genre.

The Guard was vastly expanded in the Eighties to ensure the loyalty of an Army fractured by the war with Iran. After the defeat in the Second Gulf War of '91 the Special Republican Guard was created to provide even more "eliteness" loyal to the regime. Each time it was the best guys, the most loyal, the smartest and most technically proficient who were pulled into the "elite".

By 2003 the bulk of the Iraqi Army was just fucking incapable of modern military operations and the U.S. Army went through it like a dose of salts. All that "eliteness"? As useless as a tampon in a typhoon.

The U.S. military is nowhere near as big a jugfuck as the Iraqis were and U.S. society is nothing like the trainwreck that Iraqi society was and is.

But this "Shooter" represents something I haven't seen before in the U.S. military; an elite-unit guy willing to just come out and flat-out say; I'm better than you, I work harder than you, this war (the way it's being fought and my role in it compared to yours) means that I deserve more and better stuff than you.

And those are exactly the sorts of things that led to the Special Republican Guard. We just don't have a Saddam here willing to use them to MAKE a Special Republican Guard.

But there's nothing in human nature or U.S. society that says we can't find one.

And between that and what this "Shooter" nonsense says about our country and our soldiers I can't help but worry at least a little.

Sailor slighted

Came across this article in the on-line Esquire mag yesterday.

The Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden...Is Screwed is written by someone named Phil Bronstein and advertises itself as

"...the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden tells his story — speaking not just about the raid and the three shots that changed history, but about the personal aftermath for himself and his family."

It is, as advertised, largely about the raid on Abbottabad on 6 MAY 2011.

That part's just your basic war story, a story about what might be the most famous night raid in recent history, but, still...just another no-knock entry in the thousands the U.S. Army, Marine, and Navy infantry have been doing since 2002. Read it, if you will. It's your bread-and-butter light infantry operation that at least partially accomplished the mission (Just me, but it would have been nice to have hauled ol' Osama back for a Nuremberg-style tribunal, but, whatev'; First Rule of War - Shit Happens).

Hooah, raid team. AAMs for everyone!

Sorry. Army joke.

But, kidding aside, that wasn't really what I got out of it. I've done my share of MOUT, just not with the live rounds and the angry Arabs. Didn't really need the lyrics to know how that song goes.

I did have a strong reaction to the piece, but probably not what the author wanted. What he wanted is pretty clear; to get the reader angry about "...the startling failure of the United States government to help its most experienced and skilled warriors carry on with their lives" Between the raid story the article centers around a long litany of complaints that this guy and his fellow Seal team members are getting screwed.

"But when he officially separates from the Navy three months later, where do his sixteen years of training and preparedness go on his résumé? Who in the outside world understands the executive skills and keen psychological fortitude he and his First Tier colleagues have absorbed into their DNA? Who is even allowed to know? And where can he go to get any of these questions answered? There is a Transition Assistance Program in the military, but it's largely remedial level, rote advice of marginal value: Wear a tie to interviews, not your Corfam (black shiny service) shoes. Try not to sneeze in anyone's coffee. There is also a program at MacDill Air Force Base designed to help Special Ops vets navigate various bureaucracies. And the VA does offer five years of benefits for specific service-related claims — but it’s not comprehensive and it offers nothing for the Shooter's family.

"It's criminal to me that these guys walk out the door naked," says retired Marine major general Mike Myatt. "They're the greatest of their generation; they know how to get things done. If I were a Fortune 500 company, I'd try to get my hands on any one of them." General Myatt believes "the U.S. military is the best in the world at transitioning from civilian to military life and the worst in the world at transitioning back." The Special Operations men are special beyond their operations. "These guys are self-actualizers," says a retired rear admiral and former SEAL I spoke with. "Top of the pyramid. If they wanted to build companies, they could. They can do anything they put their minds to. That's how smart they are."

But what's available to these superskilled retiring public servants? "Pretty much nothing," says the admiral. "It's 'Thank you for your service, good luck.'"

I hate to be this way, but...guys? Lemme sing you a little song I know:

"In time of danger or in war
God and the soldier we adore.
Danger past and all things righted
God is forgotten and the soldier slighted."

Some British grunt wrote that song in fucking 1645.

Ain't no different three hundred and fifty years later. If nobody told you that in Reception Station?

They should have.

I mean, yeah; it sucks to be this guy. I get that. It sucks to be an imperial grunt in a country that is fiercely pretending NOT to be fighting colonial wars, so much so that it that is practically jamming its fists into its collective ears and shrieking "ICAN'THEARYOUlalalalalala!" rather than accept what it is doing to the legionaries it is sending out to do the dirty deeds it doesn't want to hear about or is pretending are the military equal of storming ashore on the Normandy beaches instead of the vile, ugly business of suppressing foreign rebellions in shitty parts of the world.

That's the reality. You can hate it. But you can't pretend you didn't know that going in, especially now after ten goddamn years of it.

A couple of other things;

1. The article is full of sad about how the poor dude is getting screwed over because he's getting out with jack shit; "Anyone who leaves early also gets no pension, so he is without income. Even if he had stayed in for the full twenty, his pension would have been half his base pay: $2,197 a month. The same as a member of the Navy choir."

Ummm.

I know they told you that shit in Repo. You don't do your twenty, I don't care if you're Audie Fucking Murphy; you get squat. Always have, always will. You sing in the choir for 20 years, you get the brass ring. 19.9 years of hard fighting? Bupkis. Them's the rules. You may not like that, but you can't complain you didn't know that.

The article keeps talking about the Shooter "retiring". Dude; this guy ain't "retiring". He's ETSing short of retirement. Get your military terminology straight, Phil. And if you ETS short of your 20-year letter, you get...? C'mon, say it with me now..."jack"...and what else?

"Shit?"

Sorry, man. That's how it works. If the author didn't get that somebody he talked to should have squared him away. It makes the guys in ST6 sound like whiners, and I'm sure they wouldn't want that.

And this guy is described as all jacked up physically (which I believe; 16 years as a grunt would have crocked me up. Hell, they DID, in a way.). Why isn't he getting out on a medical? You CAN retire medically short of twenty. Why no discussion about that?

Next?

2. Here's the thing that completely baffled me; there's a ton of talk in this article about how special these special operators are, how any CEO and Wall Street firm and school district should be killing themselves to get them, how they're the best of the best of the best?

So where the hell was the Navy re-up guy?

The Shooter says he doesn't want to be a shooter any more. OK, fine. I'm not a squid but I'll bet there's tons of jobs in the USN that don't require a guy to bust a cap in Abu's ass. PAC clerk? Third shop? Stores? Chief of the Boat?

Plus, if these guys really were all self-actualizing and entrepreneurial as the article implies, wouldn't you think that the USN would be begging them to stay in and provide all this special leadership as senior NCOs.

Al just talked about the importance of those salty old Navy chiefs; why isn't this guy moving on from the hard-core hooah infantry fun to a cushy job the regular Navy? Beer and skittles aboard a carrier? Why isn't he heading up the path towards CPO? Why doesn't anyone in this article talk about these guys as future Master Chief Petty Officers of the Navy, as the future Kings of the Goat Locker?

Could it be...that for all the stuff in the article about how special these guys are, when you come down to it - with 16 years in the Navy this Shooter has about the same experience with troop leadership and organizational management as an infantry squad leader, an E-6 on his second or even the end of his first enlistment?

And that the sort of senior leadership you need to have to be a good Chief Petty Officer for a big organization - running a division or being Chief of the Boat - or even be a good teacher, or a stockbroker...requires more, and very different, skills than just "a fist to the helmet"?

And that these guys have, in essence, been frozen in place as infantry squaddies for more than a decade?

There's always been tension between the special operations organizations and the line dogs, but one of the reasons for that is this; these guys ARE good. They're among the best light infantrymen in the world. As a former grunt medic, I gotta respect that.

But.

That's ALL they are.

The Regular Army's problem with senior SF NCOs has always been that - short of the supposed-wartime mission of creating indig armies - an E-7 in SF is a nothing more than a super squad leader. He doesn't even get the experience of leading a platoon of grunts, let alone the experience with combined arms and the logistic and operational business of troop-leading in a combined arms battle.

So could it be that the reason the Navy re-up NCO wasn't chasing this guy is that even with 16 years in he's not really considered all that terrific as a potential line Navy chief?

I don't know, but it makes me wonder; is the Navy and, by inference, the other services doing these guys any favors allowing them to, or making them, make a home in these special operations units? If they really don't have any civilian skills, shouldn't we be making it easy for them to do their thirty years in the Navy (or Army, or Marines) and retire full of years, honors, and a fat pension?

Makes me wonder, anyway.

And finally...

3. There's the obligatory hat-tip to the Crazy Mad National Defending Skilz that these wars are supposed to have been All About; "The Shooter himself, an essential part of the team helping keep us safe since 9/11, is now on his own."

Don't get me wrong. This guy and his teammates have been fighting hard. They've been doing everything they've been asked to do, and more.

But a lot of that fighting has had nothing to do with "keeping us safe."

Everything they did in Iraq?

Not.

A hell of a lot that went down in Afghanistan, that involved chasing angry tribesmen around and around the mountains?

Not.

And the other stuff? The secret wars in places like Yemen and Somalia?

Who the hell knows? But probably some yesses, some noes.

Look. I was a soldier for years. In a lot of ways I'm still stuck inside the Green Machine. I want my soldier brothers - and that includes this guy, who for all that he wore blue, has fought as a grunt for more than a decade - to get the best life they can out of the nation and the People who employ them.

But I think that a big part of that means that the People should get the whole story about our guys; good, bad, and indifferent. And told straight out, without the attempt to "sell" the guys to the Public. I think that the Public might, just might, for one thing, start wondering why these guys have been doing this for twelve years, and whether it is really "keeping us safe", and whether there might be better ways to do this both for us and for them.

And I don't think that a big part of this article really helps with that instead of just turning it into another war story.

So; question - what do you think? Am I reading too much into this? Is this sort of article part of the problem, part of the solution, both, or neither?

De Morituris

I have a post that has been my standard for Memorial Day for years. But this year I'd like to think less about those gone than those still here.

Since 2003 the U.S. seems to have slipped into a bizarre schizophrenia. Our attitude towards the expeditionary wars we have ginned up since the end of the punitive campaign in Afghanistan has varied between a cynical resignation to a hesitant distaste. Meanwhile, our attitude towards the ridiculously small, self-selected group of people who have fought them "for" us has varied between a sort of passive bumper-sticker patriotism to an exaggeratedly disproportionate "gratitude". Charlie Pierce has a fairly good summation of this;

"Now, for the veterans of the two wars of the past decade, we're giving them all kinds of favors and goodies and public applause, and maybe even a parade or two, overcompensating our brains out, but, ultimately, what does all the applause mean at the end of the day? We are apparently fine with two more years of vets coming home from Afghanistan, from a war that 60 percent of us say we oppose. But we support The Troops. Will we become a more skeptical nation the next time a bunch of messianic fantasts concoct a war out of lies? Perhaps, but we support The Troops. Will we tax ourselves sufficiently to pay for what it costs to care for the people we send to one endless war and one war based on lies? Well, geez, we'll have to think about that, but we support The Troops."

The Army I joined, the post-Vietnam, pre-Reagan Army of the early Eighties, had a pretty cynical attitude. We'd seen our brothers, the men who were our platoon sergeants and First Sergeants, used up and then tossed away in RIFs after the end of a war that we tried desperately to pretend that we'd "won" because we were never beaten in the field. We referred to the Army as "the Green Machine" and had a pretty good understanding what the priority of "accomplishing the mission" meant to the "welfare of the troops" if the mission meant that a lot of those troops would die for and in the usual ratio of "pointless" to "contributing-to-the-accomplishing-the-mission".

We understood - because we'd seen it or lived through it - that our "leaders" both civilian and military would "lead" us into unprofitable wars, lie to us about their cunning plans to "win" them, and then toss us aside like used contraceptive devices after the inevitable ugly mess ensued. We had heard the rhetoric about "freedom" and "peace" and knew that as often as those terms meant their face value they were a happy-face sticker for "whatever advances our policy" and "make a wasteland". We were ready to do the things our government told us to do while being pretty cynical about the combination of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision that determined the way our government would decide what those things were and how they would sell them to the herd.

This stands in fairly dramatic contrast to the current volunteer force, where supposedly: "Six out of seven soldiers and Army civilians, [a new study] reveals, trust their senior leaders to make the right decisions for the Army, and 90 percent of those surveyed remain willing to put the Army’s needs above their own."

This trusting and sacrificing seem both disproportionate and inappropriate after the concatenation of lies, damn lies, and statistics that have characterized the "War on Terror". It would seem to me that having watched one administration lie it's way one war and another continue a second long after it's sell-buy date that it would behoove my country and all Americans to pause on the day we set aside to honor those killed in wars and consider just exactly what it means to "trust" their "leaders" with the lives of their fellow citizens absent any indication that that government, and those leaders, are willing to do the hard calculus to ensure that the exchange of those lives in return for the advancement of the national interest is a transaction that justifies the cost in wrecked lives and shattered bodies.

So. I'd like to think that this Memorial Day that my fellow citizens would do more than just pat the yellow-ribbon magnet on their bumper in a hat-tip to those of my fellow soldiers who went to do their nation's bidding and never returned. I'd like to think that those citizens would remember that the intent of the Founders and Framers was that We the People are supposed to be sovereign.

That it is supposed to be in our names those lives are given or taken, and that if we allow - or, worse, encourage - those who we elect to throw those lives away in the pursuit of lies, or impossibilities, and then once those lies and that nonsense are exposed, do not hold those people and ourselves to account, then we have failed to honor our pledge to them, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And, hey; I like tradition as much as the next guy.

With Their Shields or On Them

I'm sitting in front of the computer whilst the kiddos indulge in some truly reprehensible Saturday morning TV - a ritual as old as MY childhood, at least - and came across this Krugman column that ends with a comment that I thought went right to the heart of the discussions we had over at GFT about what I considered the unfortunate narrowing of the social arc of military service in the U.S. circa 2011:

"If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost."

The Krugman essay is in reference to the apparent difference between "conservatives" - who seem willing to shove any sort of public-figure misbehavior down the memory hole so long as the offending politician continues to vote for their regressive policies - and liberals, who immediately defenestrate their own "leaders" if the personal lives of those leaders vary from the public positions.But in the course of his post Krugman brings up someone I had forgotten; Ed Luttwak, who wrote back in 1995 that any hope the U.S. (and other Western societies) had of returning to a widespread national service was doomed by the replacement-level birth rates of their peoples. Luttwak's "post-heroic" societies had developed such an attachment to their children "...(b)ecause most couples have only one or two children, the loss of any in warfare becomes intolerable, and conscription becomes unthinkable..."(and)"...child-centered Americans (and Europeans and Japanese) will be forced to rely in the future on allies, mercenaries, and maybe robots to fight on their behalf."So; here I am, looking at my own precious offspring (one inert on the couch, the other somewhere in the back of the house - I can hear her chatting to herself there, anyway...) and wondering - would I give them up if my country demanded it not for existential defense, but for some abtruse foreign policy objective? Would I be "convincible" that burying my son or daughter for some transient geopolitical advantage in part of my country's imperial corona was worth the end of my own personal immortality?And I honestly don't know the answer.

But it certainly raises some difficult questions for me.

The Lament of the Frontier Guard

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers
to watch out the barbarous land:

My friend jim recently posted an extended rumination about the combat loss of a CH-47 and the embarked team of Navy SEALs. In this post he uses President Obama's term "sacrifice" to compare the way these men died to the offerings presented to the gods; in this case, the twin gods of War and Hubris that have ruled lately in the East. He asks "How can a nation sacrifice the best that we have to offer in such a blithe manner?" and suggests that these dead men were sacrifices for our national sins of arrogance and foolishness.Now I have no end of respect for jim's opinions on things military. He's been there and done that and got the O.D. T-shirt. He's probably forgotten more about soldiering than I'll ever know.

But in this case, I think he's looking at this as an American and a citizen-soldier, and that's the wrong way to look at this.

Desolate castle, the sky, the wide desert.
There is no wall left to this village.
Bones white with a thousand frosts,
High heaps, covered with trees and grass;
Who brought this to pass?
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous kings.

For most of these guys the Saturday in Wardak Province was just another day at work. They are long-service professionals - imperial troops in all but name - and they are doing what imperial troops have done since Augustus' day; carrying our imperial policy in the far reaches of the imperial frontiers.

This was no army of liberation storming ashore on the beaches of Normandy or Italy, no army of vengeance pouring gasoline into the caves of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. This wasn't even "Lafayette, we are here" or "Remember the Maine". While I'm sure that one or two of the guys who augered in somewhere in the Tangi Valley comforted themselves with the fiction that they were avenging 9/11 I'll bet most of them thought about their mission as imperials have always thought about the mission of civilizing the savages with a rifle.Long, tiring work, typically boring, occasionally terrifying, often fruitless. Pitied and ignored by the civilians safe at home, feared or swindled by the natives nearby, tasked by the uninformed higher-ups to perform everything from the pointless to the dangerous, taking successes wherever and however possible, accepting failures as part of the game.

A gracious spring, turned to blood-ravenous autumn,
A turmoil of wars - men, spread over the middle kingdom,
Three hundred and sixty thousand,
And sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning,
Desolate, desolate fields,
And no children of warfare upon them,
No longer the men for offence and defence.

And I believe we do them a disservice when we use the language of popular mass wars for what they do and how they die. The President, of course, well, it's his job to drape the charred bits of meat and bone - all that remain after JP-4 and airframe aluminum combine to combust human bodies - in patriotic bunting. He is, after all, both our national mourner and national cheerleader, saying the correct and solemn words over the caskets filled with sand, fanning the fire in the faint hearts to continue the fight that will bring more dead men home to more bereft hearts.

But we should be big enough to overlook these public platitudes and see these men for what they are; imperial legionaries of a most unimperial empire, manning the milecastles we build for them with our taxes, our reflexive rage, our incurious sloth, and our ignorance of the world and the people in it.

Those dead men, could they reassemble themselves, could they pull the poncho-liner of whole flesh back on so as not to frighten us with the gibbering horror of their deaths in a rage of fire and metal, might tell us of the people in those far places who killed them and whom they killed, the broken places and the broken tribes within them, whose ferocities and griefs they and we will never understand. They might tell us about the meaningless strobing of parachute flares in the night sky, of little villages with yesterday's bulletholes in walls that Alexander's troops passed by, of walking over the same ground they walked yesterday and finding new death buried by the roadside.

But, then again, they might not.

Because there is no way we in the soft lands and the quiet places could understand what it means to try and defeat the 14th Century with the weapons of the 20th.

Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Rihoku's name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.

Because they are atop the milecastles, peering out to the barbarous lands, and we are peacefully asleep in the fat lands within the walls. Because they know war and we do not. Because they are not our sacrifices; they are our proxies. Because, although we have never seen a tiger or know what it does...

...we feed them to the tigers.And then go home to our dinners.

Banana Republicans

I cannot express how depressing the "debt ceiling" deal is.

Not because of the substance.

We knew the wingnuts were going to kill the hostage. We knew that Obama would cave rather than let his financial interest cronies take a bath when Standard & Poors downgraded U.S. bonds. We pretty much knew how this was going to play out because we've watched Obama and the Teatards play this game for the past couple of years. The Nobel-Prize-Winner-In-Chief would make some good speeches, there would be some posturing and scuffling, like third-graders in a playground, and then the GOP would man up and Obama would roll on his back like a Gresham hootchie mama with six mojitos in her in a waterfront bar on Fleet Week.

No, the depressing part is that process has exposed us as the banana republic we are.

"Banana republic" is defined in Wiki as "...a pejorative term that refers to a politically unstable country dependent upon limited primary productions (e.g. bananas), and ruled by a small, self-elected, wealthy, corrupt politico-economic plutocracy or oligarchy"

Accepting that we at least are not yet dependent on bananas - although video entertainment may be the New Yellow - but the rest seems to fit us pretty well. The bulk of the nation doesn't want the "shared sacrifice" to be shared between those making $7,000 a year and those making $70,000. The majority of U.S. citizens doesn't want to face an uncertain future without reliable food inspections, safe bridges, clean air and water, and some hope of dying outside of poverty and desperation.

But the GOP minority and the oligarchs who love them would accept all that and more rather than accept taxes on those oligarchs. And, to echo the Rude Pundit, the thing I keep coming back to is that through all this the wars continue. That we prefer war to roads and health care and education here is unfathomably depressing.

Well, I give up. It appears that the U.S. is going to get the squalid little dictatorship of the conservatives it seems to either want, or not care about. So I'm going to open my campaign for the GOP in 2012 with the slogan "Vote Republican; Let's Just Get It The Fuck Over With". Let's elect all these batshit fuckers and open the cage doors and let them rampage amongst the populace, flinging their teabag monkey shit, hooting and leaping, tearing down the remnants of the New Deal.

A New Deal, let's not forget, that wasn't built from a cloud of eleemosynary fluffiness of FDR but from that cold-hearted old patrician's savage political calculation that his own class had to pay up in order to prevent a destitute and despairing U.S. public from making the choice that the Russian people had in 1917, the Italian in 1922, and the Spanish and German people would in years to come; the choice between the freedom to starve and want and be forced to fight, and the peace-work-and-bread slavery of fascism or communism.

Well, all right, let's have it, then.

Perhaps when enough people have watched their parents sink into destitution, when we have returned to Gilded Age levels of inequality, to Hoovervilles and bread lines, when the gated communities of the few stand like proud beacons above the decaying suburbs of the many...perhaps then the two-thirds of those in this country who describe themselves as "conservative" or "moderate" will see what their moderation and conservatism has brought them.I only hope that I am long dead by then.

(Cross-posted to GFT)

More Wonkiness on Health Care

Vice someone called Austin Frakt, here's the CBO projection for expenditures vs. revenues through 2080;Ezra Klein adds that for this to play out three things need to happen:
1) All the Bush tax cuts expire, as they’re currently scheduled to do;
2) The Medicare doc fix is either implemented or its repeal is paid for over the next 70 years, and;
3) the Affordable Care Act is implemented, and all of its spending targets are met and all of its taxes are collected.

That's all very well and good (and might as well come with magical ponies, if you think that the frigging Bush tax giveaways will EVER be allowed to expire...) but the thing that seems to escape both the pundits is on the y-axis. The assumption that tax collections will rise to 30% of the GDP.

That's wartime levels, and that's ridiculous. No public would tolerate that for very long. If that's what needs to happen to "bring deficits under control" we might as well give up right now.

But you'll notice the other thing; the "growth" of SS and "other non-interest" spending are either minimal or actually declining. The massive, massive increase is in the health care programs, and that is nearly entirely due to front-end medical costs.

So the real question is - how do we manage that?

And there are answers out there...but nearly all of them start with some variation of "socialized medicine" and, as such, are utterly off the table until the last of the 27-percenters goes into the cattle cars for transport to the secret black helicopter extermination camps for conservatives in the Utah desert.

Real medical cost control just isn't possible under the present political system.

Game over.

How You Look At It 2: Electric Boogaloo

See Al's post below. And note that most of these programs are NOT "aid to the poor"; they're entitlement programs that benefit mostly the middle class.But they're NOT a bunch of lazy, government-teat-sucking yobbos, no!

God, I love this country.

Im Westen nichts Neues

Did you know about the firefight today?

Sounds like some of the guys in Kunar Province, way out in the eastern edge of Afghanistan, had a rather trying day today. Some of the local badmashes - probably Afghan Talibanis, possibly Pakistani Talibs, possibly just locals with a case of the ass - shot up their "outpost" (whatever that represents in military terms; a patrol base, a checkpoint, an LP/OP...) with rifle and grenade fire.According to the press release the boys reacted pretty well; they returned fire and shot up their attackers, who presumably grabbed a hat; at least there's no mention of the position being endangered.

So presumably it was just another day at the office for the guys out in Bar Kunar.

In the late Twenties a former German soldier published a book about his life in World War One. The main point of the story was to show the many civilians who had no idea of the lives their soldiers had lived in the war. His title was a piece of vicious irony; the phrase "Im Westen nichts Neues" was used by the Imperial German Army to describe a "normal" day of fighting on the Western Front lines. In such a day anywhere from a handful to hundred of men would have died and more ripped up by bullets, shells, bombs, and mines while others slowly weasted away from disease and exposure. For those men, "nothing new" meant everything; the end of life, or health, or youth. In the "news" the civilians received - it meant just nothing. All this death and injury were just another day at the office.

But the guys who lived through it came back home with a head's worth of nightmare composed of boredom, hardship - ranging from discomfort to misery, stress, fear, hate, and all the other assorted crap that war stuffs into your brain housing group.

And their wives, kiddies, parents, friends, and bosses - whose heads had been stuffed with "nothing new" and marching-song bullshit for four years, had no fucking idea why the guys seemed a little tense now and then.

So I don't know why the fact that our cabinet wars have disappeared off the public news irks the hell out of me. It's nothing new, and certainly nothing shocking. Armies, countries, governments have tried stuffing the dirty work their soldiers do down the memory hole probably since Ramses' day.But it still irritates the shit out of me all the same.

"We should take nothing for granted."

Well worth the time to read: Bacevich on Eisenhower, democracy, and war.

Slaves of Duty

Richard Cohen has a worthwhile piece up in today's Washington Post.

"I was on active duty as a reservist, not for very long but long enough for the Army to have lost all its mystery. I found the Army to be no better and no worse than other large institutions. Some of its leaders were fools, and some soldiers were thieves, and everyone wasted money like there was no tomorrow. This is the truth and everyone once knew it.

No more. The military of today is removed from society in general. It is a majority white and, according to a Heritage Foundation study, disproportionately Southern. This is a military conscripted by culture and class - induced, not coerced, indoctrinated in all the proper cliches about serving one's country, honored and romanticized by those of us who would not, for a moment, think of doing the same."

Yep.

Like this or hate it, this is why a republic needs to have some way to connect its citizens with its Army. The only practical way this has ever been accomplished is through universal conscription. Yes, it's involuntary servitude. Yes, it's often cheated on and often unfair. Yes, it makes things more complicated for the professionals within the Army.

But Cohen makes some good points here. For all the "garsh, what a great Army we have now those cranky draftees are gone!" rhetoric (to which I would merely observe; really? Where are the heavyweight enemies this great Army has dispatched? The Panamanian Defense Force? The Republican Guard (I guarentee nobody calls those fuckers "elite" anymore)? The Somalian militias?) the only real difference I can see between the mass army of WW2, Korea, and Vietnam and the VolAr of Grenada and beyond is that the latter is "virtually worshipped for its admirable qualities while its less admirable ones are hardly mentioned or known."

The Founders and Framers were quite explicit in their antipathy towards a standing Army. In their opinion, an opinion formed not from airy philosophy but from having been in the impact area of Great Britain's last "little war" with France, a standing professional force made that sort of cabinet war, the same sort of cabinet wars we've been fighting in southwest and central Asia for the past eight years, much more likely.

And why is this a problem?

Because in a republic the law is supposed to be king. We're a "government of laws, not of men", remember?

But in wartime the civil law is nullified. The day of battle is a legal dies non in the common law; the only law that applies is the Law of War, and that law takes no notice of things like personal liberties or property rights beyond what is required to fulfill the minimal requirements of civilian safety. And as the great wars of the 20th Century showed, these requirements are disregarded as often as not; ask any civilian resident of Coventry, Dresden, or Hiroshima.

So when the military is worshipped and ignored, when the business of killing and dying is offshored like an automobile plant, when every President becomes a War President, and every day becomes just another day in the War on (Insert Name Here)...what becomes of the law?

What does this mean for the long term health of the Republic?

Hot for Teacher II: Hakkaa päälle

I usually run from op-ed pieces recommending "solutions" to the "education problem" like a vampire from sunlight or a priest from a pedophilia investigation, but this article was inescapable, being as it was on the front page (above the fold) of the opinion section of my local paper.

The idea that there's a hidden key somewhere (typically Finland) that will unlock the education door and make American schools something more like the shiny, happy ideals we see in Heritage Foundation fliers and pedagogical conference brochures seems almost unkillable. Somehow our nation always seems to be At Risk; at risk of failing, at risk of falling behind those regimented Europeans and cunning Asians unless we do X. Y. and Z, at risk of economic and intellectual desuetude unless we Do Something Brilliant Now.

What's the latest flavor of brilliance?

Apparently it resides in Finland. That's where they train only the "best" students to be teachers. This is our authors' notion, while they recommend somehow magically ensuring that the number of teachers trained matches the teaching jobs available to avoid the current oversupply of discouraged teachers. Let's pay them handsomely, too, finding all those tax dollars' special secret place where the voters have hidden them, and with it we'll also somehow make all schools safe, intellectually challenging places to work. Oh, yeah, then we'll find even more money to evaluate and mentor these outstanding teachers thoroughly, and finally we'll make word"teacher" the semantic and social equivalent of "investment banker" or "major league baseball benchwarmer" resulting in all sorts of public love and respect for teachers.

What could be wrong with that?

Well, nothing, of course. If teaching were like trial law, biomedical research, or writing computer code. You'd jack the pay scale, jigger the working conditions a tittle, and the Stanford and Cornell grads would come shouting in.

But teaching is nothing like these sorts of technical professions. Teaching is, fundamentally, a mixture of performance art and artisanal craft with technical knowledge thrown in on top. The skills to do it well are almost entirely personal, and the ability to teach well is highly reliant on the quick development of people skill.

And, what's more, as a teacher you're working with the Great Unwashed, the Average American; many of them will come to your classroom raised on television and video games, short of attention, patience, and ingenuity, trained to expect learning to be "fun", often poorly literate and numerate, impatient with being told that their "effort" is inconsequential and that they will not be rewarded for mediocrity.

I know, because I went from being a professional scientist to a teacher and back again.

As a registered geologist I was presented with a suite of challenging and often innovative tasks to solve in company with other professionals whom I respected and who listened to me with respect. I worked closely with my peers, my supervisors, and the clients, who acknowledged me as the subject matter expert that they were paying well for an opinion. I was able to maintain a stable family life and a fulfilling work life.

As a teacher I spent the vast majority of my day with adolescents who typically considered me an mildly entertaining irrelevance at best and an irritating nuisance at worst. I barely saw my peers and my supervisors were almost invisible. My workday consisted of attempting to introduce the most fundamental aspects of my profession to an audience that generally considered the subject (when they considered it at all) an obstacle to their social lives. I had to spend a hell of a lot of my time dealing with personal issues of people whose lives had been utterly fucked up for years prior to my encounter with them. For which time I was paid roughly half of what I made previously.

I did teach some great students, and agree that with good students teaching is among the most rewarding of tasks. But I also spent a ton of time on "classroom management" - in a setting with gave me a tenth of the tools I had had as a drill sergeant while expecting me to accomplish twice the instruction.

And possibly the worst part was the parents; many of whom didn't care or didn't know what their children were doing. many of whom were manifestly overwhelmed by their children, almost all of whom were struggling desperately under loads of work, family, debt, and a crippling lack of time and intellectual resource.

So the notion that somehow we can just wave a magic policy/money wand and make every public school Saddle River Country Day School?

Well...I think the key here is to look at the examples used in the article.

Finland
South Korea
Singapore

All of them relatively tiny, homogeneous, intensely urbanized and highly urbane polities, typically with cultures that emphasize unity, conformity, hard work and achievement. You might as well start making plans for American public schools in urban Detroit, Seattle, and Los Angeles by looking at the systems currently working so well in Grosse Pointe, Scarsdale, and Beverly Hills.

Of course the educational systems in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea work well.

Given the starting points, you'd have to be a thermonuclear-grade moron to fuck them up. I'm just guessing here, but I highly suspect that it has as much to do with the qualities of the Finns, Singaporeans, and South Koreans in the classroms as it does with picking teachers from the top 25% of the ACT and putting scented piss-pucks in the boys bathrooms.

(True fact: the boys bathrooms in the high school I taught in stank like year-old piss. One of my classes started with the idea of raising money to put those disk-shaped odor absorbers in the urinals to help make the bogs a little less nasty, assuming that the lack of pucks was a budget problem. We were informed that, no, the practice had been intentionally halted because of the number of times the pucks had been stuffed into toilets and plugged them up.

Think about that for a moment; what sort of human fishes in a public urinal for a piss-soaked disk to then shove into a public toilet.

Hmmmm.)

Okay, here's the real bottom line.

In 1965 the Coleman Report identified economic class as the single largest factor in predicting academic achievement.

That conclusion has never been refuted.

If you take a look at "failing" schools identified by the NCLB, most of them are in urban or rural poor areas. It's the same here in Portland; our "good" schools are in the parts of town that look like Finland or Scarsdale (wealthy, white) - Grant, Lincoln, Wilson. The marginal ones - Madison, Franklin, Cleveland - are in the browner, more marginal parts of town. The "failing" ones - Roosevelt here in our NoPo and Jefferson - are in the hood, either Hispanic as up here or black in the case of Jefferson. This despite a PPS policy that has been in place for years to encourage the better teachers to choose the tougher schools.

They don't - no one would. Because an American classroom in a tough neighborhood is never going to look like Singapore. Or Sweden. Or fucking Finland.

In fact, I'm going to now suggest a goddamn federal law banning on any educational nostrums, prescriptions, seminars, or on-line classes that mention the fucking word "Finland". Or "Singapore". You want to suggest a fix for education? Take something more like us or go to jail, dammit.

I suggest Brazil, maybe.

And this "education problem" isn't going away any other way, either. Income disparity in the U.S. is rising, and the percentage of people falling behind is growing, at a rate we haven't seen since the end of WW2. And the current political climate makes the notion of raising tax money to help the schools where the new underclasses will be warehoused somewhere south of unlikely and a quarter to "ain't ever gonna happen".

So, sorry, boys. I agree we can do better with our schools - though I will argue that they're not as bad as they're made to be, given the available cash and the human timber we're starting with. I won't argue that there needs to be better teacher training, testing, and mentoring, either.

But it doesn't have as much to do with finding the academic superstars as it does the great actors, improvisational standups, skilled craftsmen, and savants. I can teach math to a great teacher - I can't teach a great mathematician how to teach.

And let's face it - there's no way in hell the teacher training schools will cut back their numbers and the American public ain't gonna vote the money you'd need for all this stuff, anyway. Your little piece was a nice dream. But it was a dream.

And dreaming of Finland isn't going to solve our problems. Hell, dreaming of Finland isn't even going to lead you to the right problems.

So what IS so wrong with being Brave?

So last post I talked about why I think the current uncritical enthusiasm for the U.S. military as the guarantor of all things constitutional ("Land of the Free Because of the Brave") isn't a particularly good thing in general.

Now I want to talk about why I think it's not politically healthy for the United States in particular.

See, here's the thing:

Military power is, at bottom, about compelling action through the application of relatively unrestricted violence. In a sense, any authority works this way. You or I may obey civil law because we believe it is in the greater interest of our community, state, or nation. But if we choose not to that authority - because in a republic we vest our representatives with the authority - can use anything up to lethal force to compel that obedience.

But. We have chosen, in the United States, to hedge our civil authorities about with proscriptions. Theoretically our police and our domestic law enforcement authorities cannot do many things that would make their business simpler - things like searching, profiling, spying, or detaining, those they merely suspect of wrongdoing. Because, again, in theory, the civil contract still exists, even between those who violate that contract. We choose to imprison those of our citizens that break the rules rather than deport or execute them. They are civil criminals, not enemies. They are still within the bounds of the social contract. Our police - at least so the theory goes - cannot act towards us like our soldiers act towards an enemy.

Mind you, I suspect that they still do it, a bit, in places, at times. But I would argue that those cases merely proof the rule rather than invalidate it.

Wartime, however, is, and soldiers at war are, a legal dies non; a war, by its very nature, means that there is no civil contract. We have agreed to wartime rules that suggest that we cannot treat even our enemies like vermin to exterminate, but they are not bounded within our polity. We don't arrest them and try them - they are not violators of our contract but aliens, utterly outside of it. If we capture them we merely hold them until violence has resolved the political dispute that has made them our chattel. Then we may choose to try them, if we believe that they have committed civil crimes during the wartime, or we release them back into their own society.

And we should note that wars, in general, are often destructive to the social contract within the warring nation. In our own country we have taken actions, from imprisoning individuals without trial to imprisoning entire racial groups without substantial grounds, that would be unthinkable, were unthinkable, in peaceable times.

The history of governments, our own as well as others, suggests that wars are often destructive of political liberties. Wartime governments assume powers to prosecute wars that curtail individual freedoms. While arguably needed to be successful in war these powers are sometimes difficult to divest once peace has returned. The United States government expanded significantly in both of the Twentieth Century world wars, and was likewise fortified by the global Cold War. When Sun Tzu said that no state ever benefited from prolonged war he was speaking of the economic and social drain of blood and treasure. But the effect on politics - the effect we have seen over the past decade - tends to strengthen the government at the expense of the individual. Wars, especially modern wars, are fought by masses. The effect of war is to encourage the government to mold the citizen into a mass, to shape its public into a shaft for the military spearhead.

So.

First, we have a current situation in which a certain portion of our leadership wishes to exercise national will in a certain portion of the globe, the Middle East. This is unsurprising and the inevitable consequence of our economic, political and military status as a Great Power.

Second, we have the natural conflict with the residents of that portion of the globe that occurs when the great power puts pressure on an extraterritorial objective. Some of this conflict will, inevitably, take the form of physical violence.

Third, we have the deliberate choice of the leadership, or at least a significant portion of that leadership, to treat this resistance as a "war", and the citizenry's choice of, or at least the indifference to, this designation, and

Fourth, we have a significant portion of this citizenry that is convinced that their nation's internal defense - its "freedoms" - depends on the power of its military to fight such a war.

The result, I opine, is that there is a critical mass of U.S. citizens who believe that "Freedom is Power". They wouldn't phrase it that way, of course, but what they believe is that military power equals political freedom. That the acts of physical force, untrammeled by civil law, that a soldier must take to win a war with an external enemy are needed to ensure civil liberty. That submission to armed force - or to the sorts of legionary disciplines used to control soldiers in battle - is what is needed to "preserve our freedoms".

I submit to you that the person who believes this sort of thing is the sort of person who has little or no objection of applying military solutions to civil problems.

Secret trials? Secret sentences? Secret prisons? How are they different from what happens to enemy soldiers in wartime, who disappear into prison camps in anonymous masses, who are, if anything, dealt with by military courts martial?

Wiretapping? Spying? How are these different from military intelligence units ferreting secrets by intercepting enemy commo, interpreting recon photos, or interrogating captured troops?

A very good example of this sort of thinking is contained in the discussion of this issue can be found over at Greenwald's blog in John Eastman's response to Greenwald's criticism of the surveillance state that has grown up as part of the "War on Terror". Eastman, who as former Dean of the Chapman University School of Law, candidate for California Attorney General, and former clerk to judges Clarence Thomas and Michael Luttig should understand the difference between civil law and the law of war, even equates the surveillance of civilian suspects with the censorship of his soldier grandfather's letters in WW1.

If this sort of "we're at war so we are all like soldiers under military discipline" attitude has captured the mind of an attorney, jurist, and potential public official, how much more likely is it that the sort of person sporting a "Land of the Free Because of the Brave" bumper sticker is willing to see military discipline, wartime rules, the spartan code of the brave, applied to the everyday life of the citizen? To the civil code of the state?

This is not a healthy thing for a republic. This is not something that any politician, any pundit, any leader, should want or should encourage. This is the sort of thinking that takes the citizen and makes them the subject, the sort of thinking that makes republics into the-nation-in-arms; that takes nations with Cincinnatus and gifts them Napoleon.

Do we really want to find out if we can do that here?

Home of the Brave

One thing you can always count on driving Southeast Portland's McLoughlin Boulevard is bumper stickers.

All sorts, from the usual cowboy and redneck slogans that dominate life in the southeast through the twelve-steppers' "One Day At A Time" all the way to the "Keep Portland Weird" and the outre' band stickers of the hipsters.

But among the most common are the military. These range from my own 82nd Airborne patch decal (stuck down in the corner next to the Rose City Rollers and the literary mudflap girl that represents Mojo) through the very visible USMC propaganda, the yellow-ribbon and pray-for-our-troops painless patriotism tokens. It's pretty amazing, when you think about it, for a nation that supposedly began with a stern rejection of all things standing-army-ish, how infested we are with militaria of a rather denatured and cartoonish sort.

I caught this one as I was still laughing at the one I'd passed several miles back that stated that the driver's other ride was my mother. This kind of statement is actually pretty witty for southeast Portland, the land of the rubber trailer-hitch scrotum.

But I'm not sure the driver got the sort of sexual-dominance result he was looking for (I'm doing yo momma, bitchez!); the mental picture of my mother, 86 and in need of adult diapers, getting sexed up by this Lents Lothario struck me as powerfully ridiculous. Hey, I thought, it doesn't really work for me but you go for what you need, stud, and I was still laughing about that when I ran up behind the pickup flying another of the fairly common southeast Portland automotive messages;

"Land of the Free/Because of the Brave".Normally I shine this sort of silly shit on. I usually find it offensive but harmless, like obese twenty-somethings waddling around with SWAT team t-shirts or screaming eagle ballcaps, the sad ejecta of an American culture that says if you say you want to do something (or worse, say you merely like something) it's almost practically the exact same as actually doing the thing.

But this week I caught a little bit of the old Ridley Scott film "Blackhawk Down" and was struck hard by the bitter, bitter sorrow buried deep within the movie's over-ripe version of the vicious, futile Battle of Mogadishu.

Scott didn't mean it that way, of course; his Beyond Thunderdome battle flick is intended to make you all misty eyed about the young American heroes fighting for each other in comradely love. It's a beautiful, elegiac piece of utter crap war porn.

The American troopers are all gutsy heroes fighting for each other while the cynical politicians wheedle and betray them, of course. The hordes of Skinnies aren't really people; they are there just to be fuckdolls, to give the war porn its money shot. And like good porn, the hot pounding battle action just keeps coming; wave after wave of nameless Somali freaks seem to rise from the dead and attack like horrible real-life Negro zombies armed with AKs and RPGs, their fearsome inhumanity insuring that you will love our fighting men because you fear the dusky legions they are killing.

The reality behind the film - that this meaningless horseshit mission, the bastard product of a midnight union of eleemosynary television and credulous national greatness politics, managed to get 19 men killed and almost 100 wounded for absolutely no fucking purpose - was as invisible to the viewer as the larger context in which these men fought and died. If you took the film at its face value, as it intended you to take it, you saw only all those lovely young American men fighting and dying for the love of their country and each other. You saw the brave defending the free.

And - mind you, I'm still driving along McLoughlin, past the seedy payday loan storefronts and the chrome and neon blare of the car lots, the many newly-vacant windows where the small businesses and mom-and-pop stores have failed under the weight of the Great Recession - as I'm thinking about this I started to get angry, really angry, about the lies that our "leaders", civil and military, that our press, that our punditry, told about Somalia, about war, about the politics of Puntland, that led up to "Maalintii Rangers" - the Day of the Rangers - that left young American and Somali men dead in the dirty streets, and are still being told, told to send more young men to their meaningless deaths in the dirty streets of similarly worthless Third World cities, and told to inflate the "patriotism" of the sort of fool that drives around with a "Land of the Free Because of the Brave" bumper sticker.

And I started wondering.

What freedoms have we Brave been defending lately? Who are these Brave, and what the hell have they been doing to earn their bumper sticker praise?

Were these the brave that stopped the Grenadian armored spearheads cold in the bloody snows around Bastogne and Houfflaize and defended the Arsenal of Democracy from Caribbean aggression?

Perhaps these were the brave whose rifles shredded the Panamanian grenadiers in the fields of Freeman's Farm as we beat back Noreiga's bold bid for continental dominance at Saratoga?

Could these brave have been the brave that caused the astounded Lebanese general to cry "Those are regulars, by God!" as we repelled the Hezbollah invasion of the Midwest at the Battle of Beirut Airport?

Could these brave warriors have been the ones which sank the Al Qaeda carriers at Midway, sweeping the Pacific clean of The Pan-Islamic Co-Prosperity Sphere, and saving the West Coast from invasion?

Or the brave that rolled over the remnants of the evil Ba'ath legions on their way to Berlin and the end of the global Ba'athist threat?

...

I'm really sick of our sunshine patriotism, of the painless public worship of soldiers and soldiering, our yellow ribbons, our "War on Terror" and the same fucking self-deluding horseshit used to build it that ended seventeen years ago with good men face down in the dust in a dump of a town by the Red Sea. Men whose deaths are now meaningless and forgotten, wasted lives thrown away for a tissue of deceptions and mistakes.

If we were an honest nation we would admit that for most of the past sixty years and certainly for all of the past twenty years our armies and navies have done little but exercise the prerogatives of global power. That's what the armed forces of Great Powers do, and that's much of what we have done since the defeat of Japan, nearly all of what we've done since the defeat of the Soviets.

If we still are the land of the Free - and although I believe we still are, more or less, there are some legitimate grounds to be skeptical of this - I would say that the "brave" have had little to do with it since Tojo went to the gallows or Gorbachev on permanent vacation. It is, rather, because of the Rude, the Skeptical, the Free-thinking, the Morally Outraged, the Watchdogs of Government, the Gadflies, and the Critics.

Yes, we have sometimes served freedom, we soldiers, in our way, when we could, when it served the purposes of our political masters. But that's not our primary mission, and you forget that at your peril.

The Land of the Free isn't free because of a soldier with a gun, you idiot, it's because you, a civilian, force that man to obey you and that soldier submits willingly or faces the weight of the law.

Only a fool places blind trust in the powerful. The business of soldiering is the business of power, as the business of dealing fear and death always is and always has been, and to pretend otherwise is to place your freedom in the hands of that "brave" soldier.

Think, man!

Who, then, will guard your freedoms from him?