The first time I had any sense of connection with Newfoundland was in January 2018, at the start of my Ancestry.com research. I got a lot of information from a cousin I hadn't known about, Lynn Polsino. She traces her origins to John Joseph Brideson, and I trace mine through his sister, Laura Brideson, my great-grandmother. She was baptized in the baptismal font of what is now the basilica of St. John the Baptist in St. John's, Newfoundland.
But I didn't really feel like a Newfoundlander until three months after that discovery, when Judy and I saw the Broadway musical Come from Away. The play gave us a visceral sense of how much the townspeople of Gander and the surrounding communities had done for the roughly 7,000 "plane people" who descended on them when the 9/11 attacks forced the closing of American airspace. I remember walking out of the theater with our friends and feeling a bit of pride about this one strand of my ancestry. Minutes later, when we met other friends for dinner, I learned of the existence of "Newfie jokes," a genre of humor akin to Polish jokes. As a newfound Newfie, I took mock offense. A few weeks ago, Judy and I saw Come from Away again, and as she likes to put it, she came away with her face hurting, from smiling so much. It reinforced our excitement about the two weeks in Newfoundland that lay ahead. Now that our trip is over, I can say that my sense of Newfie pride is even stronger. Newfoundland is a profoundly beautiful place, only sparsely populated, by comparison to New York. But everyone we met there was extraordinarily kind and helpful. That kindness even followed us back to New York: Somehow, Air Canada had managed to lose one of our suitcases. As we stood forlornly in the baggage-claim area, someone came up to us and helpfully pointed out the tiny office where we could begin the process of finding it. He had a Newfoundland accent, and I asked him if he was from Newfoundland. He said he was, and I told him: "I knew it, because you're so nice." You could make the argument that Newfoundlanders need to be nice, now that tourism is so huge a part of their economy. In Come from Away, the opening song is "Welcome to the Rock," and the title is a spot-on description of an island whose solid rock does not exactly welcome agriculture. For nearly 500 years, though, from the time Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) arrived in 1497, the people of Newfoundland had made a living from a bountiful resource: codfish. But a quarter-century ago, overfishing brought about a codfish moratorium, and Newfoundlanders had to look for other ways to make ends meet. The rise of tourism helped to fill the void. So, OK, there's an economic incentive for niceness, but my brief time there persuaded me that it's a pervasive Newfoundland trait that needed no incentive. Certainly, the people of Gander and the surrounding communities needed no incentive other than the needs of the stranded "plane people" to find ways of helping them. One night on our trip, our tour director, David Harris, arranged for us to hear from Claude Elliott, who served as mayor of Gander on 9/11. The most important words that Elliott said were these: “People in need you’re supposed to help.” I found myself liking him and immensely touched by the description he gave of Newfoundlanders helping strangers. Though I later read that he had declined to perform same-sex marriages, which seems very much out of keeping with the spirit of welcome that his town embodies, I'm still glad we got the chance to listen to him. In short, I liked pretty much everything about Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders, including their charming speech patterns, such as the addition of the letter "h" at the start of some words that begin with a vowel. In a place that became famous for its airport and the aircraft that landed there, it was impossible not to like the words "hairport" and "haircraft." So, after only two weeks on the island, I feel comfort in knowing that, if the rise of authoritarian government in "the land of the free" should become intolerable, I have roots in an island of sanity, a rock with a heart, a place of welcome for refugees. As the opening song of Come from Away put it: "I'm an islander. I am an islander."
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This piece from Business Insider contains both good and bad news on the military recruitment front.
First, the good news: The army is failing to meet its recruitment goals. Excellent! Fewer young Americans signing up to fight in the Forever War. Fewer young Americans coming home from that futile combat without their limbs or suffering from PTSD, the forever nightmare that arises from the Forever War. Now, the bad news: Faced with an inability to sign as many recruits as they can, the army is thinking about focusing their efforts on kids as young as 12. That suggestion comes from the Department of the Army's assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, Dr. E. Casey Wardynski: "We have to confront this question of, will we wait until they're 17, or will be start talking to them at age 12, 13, 14, 15, when they form the set of things they are thinking about doing with their life?" It's not clear if Wardynski is a medical doctor or a doctor of philosophy. In either case, Wardynski should know that the part of the brain that enables a person to make careful decisions, the prefrontal cortex, does not fully develop until about the age of 25. The army is already asking people well under that age to make that momentous decision: whether to sign up for a job that is very likely to lead to serious, life-altering, injury—or death. Now they are thinking about making at least a preliminary approach to kids who are fully two decades away from reaching the level of brain development that would allow them to make that decision well. The prefrontal cortex also plays a role in moderating social behavior. One nasty form of immoderate behavior is sexual abuse. In fiscal year 2012 alone, the Pentagon estimated 26,000 cases of sexual abuse. And the stories keep cropping up in the headlines with alarming regularity. Could one explanation for that be the enlistment of so many people who haven't yet reached the level of brain maturity that they need to avoid immoderate behavior? So, how does the army propose to interact with these younger kids? That's easy: Meet them in the field of esports, online gaming. Creepy, but probably effective. What's next? Distributing free lunch to pre-kindergarten classes, and showing the kids some old John Wayne movies? A great question, especially since it's not just me asking it, but the mighty New York Times. The headline on this post is their headline, on this story in the At War column.
That column hasn't been the only bad news for the military in recent times—and recently in the Times. Last month, the Times ran an article under the headline: "Treated Like a 'Piece of Meat': Female Veterans Endure Harassment at the V.A." The story recounted the sexual harassment that female veterans were receiving from male veterans at a facility for medical care. One female vet said: “Standing in line at the registration desk, I was getting comments from the male patients behind me, looking me up and down. It was a major source of discomfort.” It's sad, but hardly surprising, that sexual harassment should follow women from the military into civilian life. After all, sexual abuse in the military is widespread. In one year alone, 2012, the Pentagon estimated 26,000 cases of sexual abuse in the military. Recently, a United States senator, Martha McSally of Arizona, the first American woman to fly a plane into combat, spoke publicly about being raped by a superior officer in the Air Force, and the Times reported it in this story. Then there's the matter of the International Criminal Court. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced last month that the department would not be making it easy for the court's investigators to enter the United States to pursue investigations about war crimes in Afghanistan. True to his word, the department revoked the entry visa of the court's chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda. The World Federalist Movement-Institute for Global Policy expressed its outrage over that action here. Why is the United States so eager to thwart the court? Our government doesn't want Americans prosecuted for war crimes. But do Americans commit war crimes? Well, remember the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq? Remember the Department of Justice guidance signing off on torture? Remember the Winter Soldiers testimony by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, speaking publicly about what they had done in the war, in our name? In addition to actual wrongdoing, such as sexual abuse and torture, the military has also made headlines with stunning incompetence—not a surprise in an institution that invented two acronyms about its tendency to screw up: SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up) and FUBAR (Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition). In 2016, for example, American sailors lost their way, blundered into Iranian territorial waters and ended up in the temporary embrace of the Iranian military. The image that caught the public’s attention was an American sailor kneeling compliantly in brief captivity. But most Americans didn’t focus on the incompetence that resulted in their capture. In 2017, in four separate incidents, Navy vessels collided with civilian ships in Asia. Two of the incidents cost the lives of 17 sailors. A Navy investigation found “multiple failures” in those “avoidable” fatal accidents. In short, there are plenty of reasons to be at least a tad skeptical about the military—not least among them the inconvenient reality of the current forever war, which the "greatest military in the world" has not managed to win. But none of these stories stick in the mind of the public. Instead, Americans universally and emptily utter "Thank you for your service" when they meet someone who is now or has ever served in the military. The Pentagon has helped this attitude along by "paid patriotism," paying the NFL and Major League baseball to honor the military at their games. The airlines routinely allow active duty military to board ahead of other categories of passengers, people whose service is crucial to our lives, such as teachers and doctors. Politicians find it important to lionize the military as a way of justifying the wars that the troops are sent to fight. Example: President George H.W. Bush, casting about for a reason to lunch the Gulf War, settled on the troops themselves. If we didn't honor the troops—and, by extension, the war he wanted them to fight—we'd be repeating the dishonor that troops returning from Vietnam endured. In popular memory, those troops faced a a torrent of spit. So, the thinking goes, we have to make up for it, with almost idolatrous attitudes toward the military. In a book called The Spitting Image, Jerry Lembcke, a Vietnam veteran and sociologist, comprehensively debunked the spitting myth. The bottom line is this: We'll never break our forever-war habits as long as we fail to hold the military to account. Young people will still join. In fact, the high esteem of being in uniform may be one factor in that enlistment decision, along with patriotism and the need for a job. They'll still be sent on multiple deployments to the forever war. They'll still return home injured, in mind or body, or both. And they'll still fail to get the medical care that we owe them. So, it's time to take a much more realistic, much less idolatrous attitude toward our military. Our current attitude is dangerous not only for the nation but also for the troops themselves. In life, forgiveness is crucial. But in baseball and in politics, eternal grudges are perfectly acceptable. Take Steve Schmidt. Please.
We all remember the brilliant political strategist's most infamous achievement: making scatterbrained Sarah Palin a nominee for vice president. In more recent times, people have looked at Schmidt more fondly, because he has renounced his Republican affiliation and has become one of the most acerbic critics of the current "president." Now Schmidt has decided to go all harebrained again, by becoming the political guru behind the caffeine-fueled nascent presidential candidacy of Howard Schultz, the Starbucks guy. On one level, this could be a brilliant move by Schmidt: If Schultz actually gets on the ballot in all 50 states and somehow manages to split the anti-President Spanky vote and get him re-elected in 2020, that will make a lot of people forget about the Palin episode. Not me. I can hold a grudge against him forever, for both outrages. Meanwhile, let's hope that cable news executives end his gig as an expert "contributor" as long as this insane campaign continues. Why is the Schultz idea so nutty, even apart from the likelihood that it could give us four more years of the most incompetent president in American history? Here's why: If we have learned nothing else from the past two years, we have learned the utter idiocy of the perpetual Republican mantra that we should run government like a business. To the extent that you can describe our organizationally challenged "president" as running anything, he is running the United States government just as he ran his private business: badly. He is rich for three reasons: 1) His father gave him hundreds of millions to start with. 2) His main business practice is to refuse to pay people who have worked for him, until they sue him. 3) He apparently was not issued a conscience. It's time for a president who has actually had some experience in governing—not another billionaire with zero knowledge of how to govern a city, a state, or even a legislative office. The whole Schultz-Schmidt idea is as solid and substantive as latte foam. Don't swallow it. Young men and women go off to die in wars started by old men and, sadly, women too. That's the way of the world.
My wishful solution has always been this: Revive the draft, make it truly universal, with no loopholes, no way to dodge it—not even for members of Congress. Oh, and make the draft age 55. Why am I bringing this up out of nowhere, you might ask. My answer: a Colman McCarthy column in the National Catholic Reporter. Reflecting on the new class of women in the 116th Congress, he expressed the hope that they'll remember the first woman ever elected to Congress, Jeanette Rankin. She so distrusted war that she voted against not only World War I, but World War II. In the resulting avalanche of hostility, she lost her seat twice. In his column, McCarthy lists several of his favorite Rankin quotes. At the top of the list: "You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." And just below it, this one: "If they are going to have war, they ought to take the old men and leave the young to propagate the race." That got me thinking again about making the draft age 55. This would solve a couple of problems. One is the Chicken Hawk problem: people who love war, who gladly push our nation into it, but don't want any part of fighting in it themselves. Two prime examples are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Despite my utter contempt for the current "president," he doesn't really belong in this category. Yes, he found a way not to be in the military. Hence, one of his many nicknames: Cadet Bone Spurs. Yes, he actually said that avoiding sexually transmitted disease was his own personal Vietnam. But at least he wasn't an advocate for the Vietnam War. He was too busy amassing money and failing to pay workers what he owed them. The other problem is the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that helps us make wise choices. Generally, it doesn't fully develop until 25. That means that far too many young men and women join the military long before their brains are fully capable of making life-altering decisions, like subjecting themselves to repeated deployments to the Forever War. Some may join because of patriotism. Some are seduced by two endlessly repeated phrases in our culture, "decorated veteran" and "war hero," that make war seem the path to glory, when it's really the road to gory. Set the draft age at 55, make it impossible to dodge, and the number of stupid wars would decline sharply. This sounds Pollyannaish, of course, but not nearly as insanely optimistic as the mistaken view that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can actually be won. We've been hearing that lie repeatedly since 2001. So, thanks to Colman McCarthy and Jeanette Rankin for stating and restating this simple truth. Everyone else seems to be writing about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Why not me?
So many sober and boring paragraphs are emanating from the commentariat, from older and (they think) wiser Democrats, about how she should slow down, shut up, and passively join the seniority system's endless wait-your-turn queue. They say she should stop tweeting and get down to serious business. But I hope she keeps rattling cages, especially Republican ones. Her arrival reminds me of a scene from the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Maybe you remember it: Lou Grant, the grumpy editor at a Minneapolis TV station, meets Mary Richards, his bright and irrepressible new assistant, and he says: “You’ve got spunk.” She smiles and begins to say something to acknowledge this unexpected praise. But before she can really respond, he adds, grumpily: “I HATE spunk!” Here's that moment. AOC is light-years more outgoing and unafraid than the timid Mary of the early episodes. But Lou Grant's I-hate-spunk reaction to Mary, nearly a half-century ago, is a pretty accurate precursor of AOC-phobia, which causes experienced legislators to react in horror to a young woman already more famous than any of them. She makes them crazy because she is smart, fierce, and unafraid, because she likes to dance, and because she has, you know, spunk. The old, stuffy, grumpy, pinstriped Republicans also hate spunk. Like Mary Richards, AOC has lots of it. Like Mary, she will ultimately prevail. It was, after all, the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Lou Grant had to settle for a spinoff series of his own, which wasn't nearly as good. The AOC haters boo when she does nothing more subversive than cast a vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker. They have no idea what to do about her, except to roll out the old, tired expletives that they always use: radical and socialist. They rant when she proposes a sensible, already-tried-in-the-Eisenhower-years policy, a top tax rate of more than 70 percent on the wealthiest Americans. In the New York Times, Paul Krugman showed the error of their ways and the correctness of hers. They recoil from her lightning-fast tweets—far more witty and literate than the ones emanating from the stubby fingers of the current "president." Among all the words written about her, an interview in The New Yorker with historian Rick Perlstein sums her up best. Here's a small sample: "When I watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez operate with such aplomb and skill and obvious erudition, she reminds me of when people like you and me stood around at a cocktail party or a dinner party and inevitably the conversation turned to, Why are the Democrats where they are? Why don’t they take the fights to the enemy? Why don’t they pivot off troll-y comments from the Republicans, instead of playing the game on their terms? Why aren’t they offering clear, bold, long-term, super-jumbo policy solutions that people can remember instead of triangulating everything the Republicans suggest?" For Perlstein, AOC is just what the doctor ordered to shake Democrats loose from their post-Reagan trauma. That makes sense to me. Sure, she'll make some rookie mistakes, but she'll admit them, and she'll learn from them. For Perlstein, and for me, she's a source of hope. For more than four decades, covering politics for Newsday, I felt I had to remain a registered "blank." The vast majority of the time, I voted for Democrats, but I could always find a Republican local official worth voting for. Now, in retirement, I could register as a Democrat, but I haven't really felt it. The Democrats too often act afraid. "Oh, please don't call me soft on crime. Oh, please don't call me soft on national defense." And those fears allow Republicans to set the agenda. Now, if AOC and other young Democrats manage to drag the party, kicking and screaming, into a more boldly progressive approach to governance, I might even join. If you aren't already sufficiently nervous about what comes next in the wacky world of our current "president," you should read a long, smart, and terrifying analysis by Elizabeth Goitien of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. If you don't have time to read the full piece, take a look at this get-to-the-point video by Goitien for The Atlantic.
The headline of the analysis is: "What the President Could Do If He Declares a State of Emergency." Goitien describes the many emergency powers that Congress has granted presidents over the years. They're still on the books, and Trump could take advantage of them if he needs them, say, to suppress journalism. What would the emergency be? Well, pretty much anything that makes Trump feel cornered and desperate would qualify as an emergency in his mind. Then he could use one or more of the many emergency powers waiting around to be invoked. Here's the scary paragraph that sums up Goitien's concerns: "This edifice of extraordinary powers has historically rested on the assumption that the president will act in the country’s best interest when using them. With a handful of noteworthy exceptions, this assumption has held up. But what if a president, backed into a corner and facing electoral defeat or impeachment, were to declare an emergency for the sake of holding on to power? In that scenario, our laws and institutions might not save us from a presidential power grab. They might be what takes us down." The other scary prospect, of course, is how Trump will react (I'm betting, not well) if he finally realizes that he could find himself indicted once he's out of office. Faced with this White-House-or-Big-House possibility, he would do pretty much anything in 2020 to avoid exiting the unindictable comforts of the presidency and facing prosecution. If he wins re-election, he'd have to hope that, by the time he leaves office in January 2025, the statute of limitations would have expired for any crimes he committed during the 2016 presidential campaign. If he runs and loses in 2020, he'd become plain old Citizen Trump in early 2021, and the statute of limitations on any 2016 crimes would not have passed. Faced with that harsh reality, he would run his 2020 campaign as if his life depended on it. Both possibilities, the invocation of emergency powers and a ferocious, no-holds-barred 2020 re-election effort, should be enough to scare you senseless. In a week when endless encomiums for George Herbert Walker Bush dominate television, a time when even the weather channels seem ready to forecast a 90 percent chance of canonization, it seems churlish to say: Whoa! But I'm having trouble fitting Bush 41 for an official halo.
I'm also having trouble reconciling two realities: my inability to forget the ways he damaged the nation and the world, and the Gospel obligation to forgive seventy times seven times. This is how I parse that problem: Forgiving personal transgressions is mandatory, but forgetting historical harm is dangerous. So, amid the loud hosannas, I looked around for some more hardheaded analyses of Poppy's stewardship. Two writers whose work I admire really delivered. Here's a suitably snarky piece by William Rivers Pitt of Truthout, and here's a detailed list of Poppy's failings, by Mehdi Hasan of The Intercept. In addition, I found this bare-knuckled assessment by Paul Street on the aptly named Counterpunch. If you read those three pieces, you'll see most of what makes the unbridled praise for Bush 41 so tough to take. At the top of the list is the Gulf War. It was totally avoidable, if Bush the former diplomat and former CIA chief had devoted serious energy to pursuing a diplomatic solution. Instead, Poppy began the destruction of an entire nation by turning loose the American military on the far inferior Iraqi forces, leading to the "turkey shoot" slaughter of retreating Iraqi troops on the Highway of Death from Kuwait into Iraq. It's fashionable now to praise Poppy for the restraint he showed in not ordering a pursuit of Saddam Hussein's forces all the way to Baghdad, to bring about a regime change. But the destruction of Operation Desert Storm, the damage to vital infrastructure, the deaths of many thousands of Iraqi soldiers, was just the prelude to the cosmic tragedy of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by Poppy's son, George W. Bush. Destroying Iraq was not the only job that Poppy started and Dubya completed. The presence of thousands of American troops in Saudi Arabia was a key element in Saudi native Osama bin Laden's 1996 declaration of war against "Americans occupying the land of the two holy places," Mecca and Medina. Five years later, when Bush 43 took office, he basically ignored outgoing President Bill Clinton's warnings about bin Laden. So Bush 41 and Bush 43 bracket 9/11. To my mind, they share some level of culpability, first for the provocation of stationing troops in Saudi Arabia, then for the failure to react sufficiently to the threat that bin Laden posed. As to Poppy's temperament and personality, those who glibly call him gracious should recall his leading act of ungraciousness: the shamelessly racist Willie Horton ad that helped him defeat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election. Other blots on his copybook include the pardons he extended to those who cooked up the Iran-Contra deal while he was vice-president to Ronald Reagan, and the wholly unnecessary invasion of Panama. One outrage not covered in the pieces I mentioned is an argument that Poppy used as he sought a suitable reason for the Gulf War. If we didn't support his war, Poppy argued, we'd be dishonoring the troops, much as the veterans returning from Vietnam felt dishonored by the people who spat on them. His argument advanced a myth that Professor Jerry Lembcke of the College of the Holy Cross later debunked in his book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. “In the United States, the idea that Vietnam veterans had met with malevolence gained prominence during the fall of 1990, when the Bush administration used it to rally support for the Persian Gulf War," Lembcke wrote. "After sending troops to the Gulf in August, the administration argued that opposition to the war was tantamount to disregarding their well-being and that such disregard was reminiscent of the treatment given to Vietnam veterans upon their return home….President Bush had effectively turned the means of war, the soldiers themselves, into a reason for the war.” So, as the week of George Herbert Walker Bush's burial fades in memory, it can't hurt to remember his more charming moments, such as the relationships he built with the comedian who imitated him, Dana Carvey, and the columnist who didn't always write what he liked, Maureen Dowd. But let's not forget that he left behind a lot of damage. One of the many annoying aspects of the Trump presidency is that it has created an unwarranted Bush nostalgia. True, on the scale of personal odiousness and comprehensive cluelessness, Trump is far worse. But on metric of body count, he is—until now, at least—not even close to the bloody Bushes. Remember when the billionaire candidate kept saying that, if he were elected president, we'd all be saying Merry Christmas again? He is now, God help us all, the president. But it's not likely to be a very merry Christmas for the troops he's sending to the United States-Mexico border.
It's beyond debate that shameless midterm fearmongering is the reason Cadet Bone Spurs—who never entered the military and never got deployed anywhere—is deploying something like 15,000 troops. A leaked Pentagon document makes clear that the military thinks there's virtually no threat from the caravan that has Bone Spurs quaking in his boots. The slow pace of this fearsome caravan almost guarantees that those troops will be at the border, doing nothing much, through the holidays. It's possible to argue that they are better off languishing safely in the warmth of America's Southwest, facing no real threat, than being in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the forever war drags on endlessly, producing no real result but death and injury. But many of those young men and women were not getting ready for immediate deployment to a combat zone. They have been stationed on posts in the United States, living with their families. Now they must leave those families behind—no Thanksgiving, no Hanukkah, no Kwanzaa, no Christmas, no New Year's Eve—for a mission that is entirely bogus. "Support the troops" is one of the facile, ubiquitous, but meaningless mantras of our times. But sending them off to protect the nation from this threat, which their own generals feel is negligible, is hardly supporting the troops. Let's hope they remember this heartless behavior by the commander-in-chief if he's still in office and seeking re-election in 2020. They should keep in mind this holiday season, separated from their families, when they vote in 2020. Here's the latest episode in the voter suppression saga in Georgia.
Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor and vote-suppressing secretary of state, didn't mince words at a campaign gathering. The meeting was behind closed doors, but Rolling Stone found a 21-minute audio, in which Kemp said that the get-out-the-vote effort by Stacey Abrams, his Democratic opponent, "continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote." Concern, Brian? Really? Isn't voting what this country is supposed to be about? His whole strategy is to keep people of color from voting in an election where his opponent is a formidable African-American woman. This piece gives you more insight into the utterly shameless Kemp. He needs a shame transplant, if he can find a suitable donor. Good luck with that in today's Republican Party, where shame is in short supply. |
AuthorFirst in my class in Officer Candidate School. Late to the conclusion that our attitude toward the military is idolatrous. Archives
February 2022
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