I am probably the millionth blogger to comment on Major Hasan’s alleged massacre of 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, and I’m sure it won’t stop there. I have to say, though, that the rhetoric I’ve been hearing over the past week has made it impossible for me not to toss my screed 
onto the growing pile. Commentators pretty much across the mainstream spectrum of opinion have latched onto this idea that Hasan was given the chance to do this heinous act by virtue of a culture of “political correctness” within the military, i.e. the Army being over-sensitive to Muslims within their ranks and overlooking Hasan’s failings. This strikes me as wildly off the mark and – worse – an attempt to utilize an unspeakable act of murder to make political points. It’s also part of the very common practice of mainstream commentators to avoid the elephant in the room when discussing matters related to our two simultaneous wars; namely, the true costs of such extended conflicts on those who fight in them, and the unwillingness of so many of the rest of us to share that burden in any meaningful sense.
One point few will disagree with – Hasan is a nut job who could have done a lot of things other than shoot up a roomful of people to express his rage. And his superiors obviously ignored many warning signs. But I think there’s a better explanation for this than “political correctness”, and it’s (wait for it): resourcing a major overseas deployment without conscription. They need trained professionals, and they sure as hell can’t draft them, so they take what they can get, even if they are severely incompetent. And homicidal maniacs? Who knows… perhaps they get waved through, as well. We are sending them over to kill people, among other things. But in a nation run by politicians who would rather bankrupt us all than institute something as deeply unpopular as a military draft, the military must take the bad with the good in order to fulfill the demands of our seemingly endless wars. And even then, we’re talking about multiple deployments (some brigades on their fifth), reservists tapped, national guard troops sent overseas, the works.
So here’s this army psychologist tasked with counseling soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan – individuals who are having severe problems, no doubt. They are coming back from Iraq with stories of the kind heard in detail during the Winter Soldier hearings of a couple of years ago – telling them to a devout Muslim with fundamentalist leanings. This Major Hasan has a skinful of this stuff and is taking abuse about being a Muslim himself. He is told he is to be shipped overseas for the first time and is working on getting himself out of the military entirely. Like so many instances in the modern military, this was another atrocity-producing situation in the making. But the fact that this very screwed-up guy got as far as he did speaks volumes about how thinly stretched our armed forces are, particularly with 120,000 troops still in Iraq and major influxes planned for Afghanistan (it appears).
Not to worry, America – Joe Lieberman is going to investigate. Civilization is saved. I’m sure we can rely on him to get to the bottom of this issue, in a manner of speaking.
luv u,
jp
Oh, hi, you-all. Hope everything is well back on Earth. We will see you there soon, I trust, as we appear to be heading in that general direction, assuming Mitch Macaphee’s navigational skills have not gone seriously downhill in the last month or so. (We walk by faith, not sight.) Rolling to the end of another outer-limits tour – this one a bit more ad hoc than previous outings, apropos of the severe economic recession back home. Couldn’t even afford to brand this tour, and that typically doesn’t cost much more than a couple of beers at the local pub. (We quaff them until somebody emits a decent idea… or something a bit less savory.) As you know, Big Green always operates on the cheap, but this time was the worst yet. As someone who’s used to dry Soy Slice sandwiches, it took some time getting used to sandwiches made with the empty plastic wrappers Soy Slices come in. And water, nothing but water to drink between gigs. That’s better than no water, but still…. water for six weeks? What would my bartender say? (Between sobs…?)
election. I understand the man-sized tuber was going to be on the ballot for town councilman back in our small upstate New York community of [INSERT NAME OF TOWN HERE]. His opponent, a member of the [INSERT PARTY HERE] party, was running on a “no vegetables in council” kind of platform, which seem kind of small minded to me. The man-sized tuber, on the other hand, was running as a representative of the [GENERIC] party. (No, that’s not an editor’s note. The party’s name is [GENERIC] in all-caps and brackets.) The [GENERIC] party’s position is that anything you say, do, or write needs to be adaptable to every imaginable set of circumstances. It’s the ultimate in egalitarianism, if you ask me. And it’s the reason that all of the [GENERIC] party’s position papers read like the preceding few lines. After winning that bi-election in [INSERT CITY HERE], the party chairman [INSERT NAME HERE] feels a lot more confident about that strange convention of writing.
town council when we get home. For the nonce, we can only speculate. (Though Lincoln has taken it upon himself to offer advice to tubey, having had a political career himself at one point in his trans-temporal existence.) Besides, there’s plenty to think about. After all, our album 
changing the terms of my credit agreement. In essence, they said they were raising the interest rate on my card to 23%. Yes, that’s right – 23% on a balance well below my credit limit, on a card I’ve had for at least a decade without missing a payment. You don’t seem surprised. Perhaps they’ve done the same to you… and, in fact, they are doing the same to everyone, as far as I know. It seems CitiGroup, the recipient of $45 billion in publicly funded bailout dollars, has settled on a business model that empties the pockets of American taxpayers a second time. Charging 23% and more on credit in an economic environment such as this, when people are losing their jobs, their homes, their shoes, for chrissake… and when institutions like Citi are drawing money from the Federal Reserve lending window at 0% to 0.25% interest. So… I guess when they’re earning less than 20% on your ass, you’re considered a non-performing asset.
Of course, it goes beyond that. The banking sector is making life impossible for people’s employers, as well. It’s making it hard to get credit for capital expansion. It’s tightening up on educational loans, scrutinizing the financial profile of colleges and universities to a more stringent degree than even the Department of Education uses. It’s lobbying hard against its own regulation, particularly the proposed Consumer Protection agency. So it seems like we need to severely limit these people’s ambitions, instead of acting as though everything is still the way it was three or four years ago when nothing could ever go wrong, ever. Meanwhile, there seems to be no limit on the amount of money we can borrow to burn pointlessly (and, in fact, profoundly counterproductively) in Iraq and Afghanistan, year after year. It almost seems as though Obama is beginning to see the handwriting on the wall with respect to the latter war. I wonder when he’ll see it with respect to these rapacious financial institutions.