I saw in our local newspaper this week that a bridge will be named for one of the guys from this area who was killed in Iraq. Understandable gesture, to be sure, and I hope it brings some measure of solace to his family. If it does, they should dedicate a bridge to every one of the more than 4,300 sacrificed needlessly in that seemingly endless war. I doubt we have enough bridges to name for all the Iraqis who’ve died as a result of the 2003 invasion. (I don’t know – are there a million bridges in America?) Whenever I hear about these dedications, monuments, memorials to war dead, I can’t help but think of that eulogy Marc Antony delivered in Julius Caesar: “I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.”  We always hear about how they died “protecting our freedoms,” when really they died because of our ignorance as a nation and our inability to stop this travesty from happening.

This has nothing to do with how soldiers and their families feel about the war and how it has affected them. They are the only ones at war in this country right now – the rest of us are living in peacetime. And when our political leaders climb over one another to ascribing a noble cause to the crime that is the Iraq war, they are merely praising themselves at the expense of the fallen. The war that they started, on our behalf, is still ruining lives day after day, month after month, year after bloody year. Seems like I’ve been seeing that succession of faces at the end of the PBS News Hour each week for as long as I’ve been alive, each one making me feel more ashamed of my failure to have prevented this grievous loss. We should all feel that shame, every one of us who is not in jeopardy of being deployed, who merely sees this war as a tiresome cable show that has gone on a bit too long. And like Antony, we should use our outrage to seek justice and accountability – but most importantly, an end to the killing.

Will this happen in America? I’m growing more than a bit pessimistic. The vast, vast majority of us are too separated from the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. At most, we wag a sign in the air outside our congressman’s office, or we shake our head at the news, but without the prospect of conscription threatening ourselves and/or our children, there will be no fire in the belly. That is something our political class and our military have long since worked out. They’ve long since adopted the imperial formula for endless war – a foreign legion made up of volunteers, supplemented by mercenaries. And they name bridges after those sacrificed on the alter of our stupidity. So perhaps we need a different kind of monument, one dedicated to those persistent killers that live within us: ignorance and apathy. That’s it – dedicate a bridge to our own foolishness. Or chisel Dubya’s face into Rushmore so that we’ll remember who talked us into this travesty. Anything to memorialize the historic, disastrous mistake we’ve made, so that there’s some small chance we won’t repeat it.

Then again, there’s still the war to remind us.

luv u,

jp

Any of you ever have an elderly parent enter the hospital? How about spending time in a hospital yourself? Well, I’ve had that experience (as millions have) and one of the first things you do is fill out paperwork designating a health care proxy, establishing medical directives (i.e. resuscitate or not), and so on. Basically routine stuff that the hospital needs to know when a loved one is receiving care and may not be able to speak for him/her self at a crucial juncture. Pretty scary, eh? What…. aren’t you scared of that? Because that’s what Sara Palin (a.k.a. the Wassila brain trust), John Boehner (pronounced “boner”), Chuck Grassley (a.k.a. his own grandmother), Newt Gingrich (a.k.a. Captain Yesteryear) and others are trying to make you afraid of: a routine consultation that proposed health care legislation might end up providing coverage for. Not some new federal power to cull the herd. Just funding for the kind of meeting people have with their doctors all the freaking time. Be afraid!

The fact is, your grandma need fear Obama only if she lives in Afghanistan, or maybe Iraq. The only “death panel” we’ve got is the gaggle of advisors who keep these wars going year after year. Just this morning NPR reported on the expanding war in “strategic” Helmand Province, leading with reports of the many pains taken to avoid civilian casualties, including a British air strike called off at the last minute to spare civilians, then proceeding into an interview with a Major General Michael Flynn that talks about a new “focus” on the population, rather than the enemy – looking to understand what they want… after nearly eight years of the U.S. war.  Unaddressed in that interview was the issue of what happens if the people of Afghanistan want something other than what U.S. policymakers want, such as, get your military the hell out of my country. Might have been a good question to ask the general, inasmuch as he and his colleagues are taking such pains to determine what’s in the hearts and minds of the people that are suffering as a result of this blinkered policy.

When I see the air time allotted to the immensely ill-informed protesters at various Congressional town hall meetings, I feel grateful that we live in a nation that allows a voice to dissent… until I recall that, in the run-up to both the Afghan and the Iraq wars, very very few voices of articulate dissent were allowed on the airwaves, and almost as few have been heard from since… even though, in the case of Iraq particularly, the claims of the anti-war movement have been borne out to an extent that no one would have thought possible six years ago.  Seems that only those dissenters who are aligned with major corporate interests can expect to be heard from loudly and clearly. Not that they seem all that appreciative. Hell, here they are at a public forum that allows private citizens to comment, participate, and even debate political leaders, and they act as though they’re being squelched, even though they are, in fact, squelching the opinions of those who disagree with them.

It almost seems like that’s the whole point. Hmmmmm….

luv u,

jp

I haven’t been what you might call a determined dissident over my decades as an adult. Just an occasional participant at rallies, protest marches, etc. There are very many in my own small community who have given far more to the causes they believe in, and I respect them for it. Just as I respect pacifism, as someone who (while no fan of violence) is not a committed pacifist. It does my heart good to see those large numbers of protesters in the streets in Iran. This is a huge moment for them, one that many of the younger people among them, particularly, will never forget. Though the mainstream political and media pundits would probably disparage this connection, it’s something like the massive anti-war actions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which of course our popular culture has shrunken down to something akin to a flower-power postage stamp.  (Just as it has reduced the civil rights movement to Martin King saying “I have a dream.”)

I know that the reason why we see so much of the Iranian movement is because of the fact that Iran is an official enemy and anything that places that government in a bad light is officially a “good thing”. That is also why very little is said about the politics of the Iranian dissidents. (Irony alert: if they had decisively won the election, they would be demonized right now for their positions on Israel/Palestine, U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, and so on.) This doesn’t take anything away from them, but it does say a lot about our political culture. Organized dissent always encounters very strong resistance in this country when it stands against deeply entrenched institutional interests like the foreign policy establishment, the military-industrial-congressional complex (Ike’s original formulation of that nexus), or major industrial groupings, such as financial services, health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, etc. Vietnam War protests, for instance, were strongly condemned from the very beginning, and really only achieved critical mass towards the end of the sixties and the early seventies.

So, what about the dissenting voices heard at town hall meetings across America this summer? Well, David Brooks seems to equate them and their various conspiracy theories (e.g. Obama is going to force people to accept “death counseling” – be afraid!) with the anti-Iraq war movement that pegged the drive towards war largely on the influence of neoconservatives formerly associated with the Project for a New American Century, which, in fact, led the drive for war and regime change in Iraq starting in the Clinton Administration.  Now, I’d say that is a little bit too fact-based to qualify as a conspiracy theory on the order of, say, Obama’s mandatory death counseling. The fact that the neoconservatives associated with PNAC were not the only ones in favor of the Iraq war doesn’t exactly absolve them of all responsibility. But the flaw in Brook’s comparison goes deeper than that. The pre-emptive movement against the War in Iraq was a massive, organic, global phenomenon that grew in the near-total absence of any articulate anti-war opinion in the mainstream media during 2001-2003. These crackhead gatherings at town hall meetings (including one in my own town led by some idiot from Rome who later went on the even more profoundly idiotic Glen Beck’s show) are not anything like a mass movement organized around a coherent goal. They’re just disparate groups of disgruntled conservatives shouting about having been out of power for six whole months.

That said, they’ve got every right to go to these public meetings. I just think people who support the idea of universal health coverage need to attend, as well… and be vocal. And articulate. ‘Nuff said.

luv u,

jp