OK, what's samizdat?
The dictionary definition is: "the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state, especially formerly in the communist countries of eastern Europe." This is definitely not that, but I've always loved that word. Now that we have a "president" who seems to be in love with Russia and its leader—precisely the kind of person, by the way, most likely to ban literature—I am using it to describe pieces I wrote that didn't get published. So I'll put them on this website, so they can find a home. The first is one I wrote during the Republican presidential debates of 2016. I think it's relevant now, with a "president" who thinks he was in the military and has surrounded himself with generals.
SNAFU and FUBAR
Unrestrained deference to the military is a scary character trait in presidential candidates. The nation’s founding generation, after all, deeply feared the prospect of a standing army and built civilian control of the armed forces into our flawed Constitution. So, presidential candidates who bow too deeply to the military are not to be trusted.
Take Ted Cruz. Most of the talk about him after the most recent Republican debate was about New York values and natural born citizenship. But let’s not forget that the Texas senator, whose resume includes brilliance in debate but not a single day in the military, began his performance by blindly defending sailors who had strayed off course and gotten themselves captured by the Iranian regime.
“Today, many of us picked up our newspapers, and we were horrified to see the sight of 10 American sailors on their knees, with their hands on their heads,” Cruz said. “In that State of the Union, President Obama didn’t so much as mention the 10 sailors that had been captured by Iran.”
What did Cruz want Obama to say? As a volunteer speechwriter, maybe the senator would have put these words in the president’s mouth: “Our brave sailors got lost, strayed into another nation’s territorial waters, and are being released. But we are going to bomb Iran anyway, to help Ted Cruz find out if sand glows in the dark.”
If Cruz had spent any time in the military, he’d have learned about its capacity for error. It was service members, after all, who invented the unsubtle acronyms SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up) and FUBAR (Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition), to describe the everyday reality of life in the armed forces. In this case, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter admitted, the sailors in question fouled up the basic naval task of navigation. The Iranians held them briefly, then let them go.
Not good enough for Cruz. “I give you my word, if I am elected president, no service man or service woman will be forced to be on their knees,” Cruz said, “and any nation that captures our fighting men will feel the full force and fury of the United States of America.” In other words, he’d reject the delicate negotiation that led to a bloodless result. Instead, he’d bomb first and ask questions later.
The current naval SNAFU would have come as no surprise to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Unlike Cruz, he actually served in the military, in World War II. After a Japanese vessel destroyed PT 109, the small boat he commanded, Kennedy famously and courageously rescued his crew. What we don’t remember as well as that story is Kennedy’s lifelong disdain for the military.
Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek reports that, writing home from the Pacific, Kennedy criticized the ineptitude of his superiors and sneered at what he called the “super-human ability of the Navy to screw up everything they touch.” Later, as president, he came to regret taking the disastrous advice of the intelligence community and the military: Go ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. That failed plan sowed the seeds of the Cuban missile crisis, which almost led to nuclear war with Russia.
Happily for the nation—not to mention the planet—his skepticism of the military continued during the crisis. Wisely, he rejected the advice of Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, whose colorful nicknames included “Bombs Away.” To Kennedy’s face, LeMay said Kennedy’s proposed blockade of Cuba was “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” LeMay’s idea: Attack Cuba.
Right after that meeting, Kennedy told an aide: “Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that? These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”
These are difficult times to say the military is ever wrong:
Despite all that lavish praise, we live in a time when the Pentagon itself reported 26,000 cases of sexual abuse in 2012 alone. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has worked hard to change the way these crimes inside our military get prosecuted, but she has run up against opposition even in her own party. This is not a trivial problem.
None of this is to say that we should treat service members and veterans with anything less than respect.
On their way in, we owe them honesty. They need to know, in starkly clear language, that no matter what recruiters may promise in the way of training for post-military civilian employment, the needs of the service always come first. They may have signed up to learn about computers, but recruiters must tell them clearly that they could end up in multiple combat tours in Afghanistan or Iraq.
On their way out, we owe veterans excellent, accessible medical care and meaningful help in re-integrating into civilian life. As a nation, we should be deeply ashamed that so many veterans are homeless and so many are committing suicide.
In this presidential campaign, can we realistically expect anything like a balanced view of the military to emerge? Probably not. But we must remember Kennedy’s example. Thanks to his refusal to bow meekly to people with ribbons on their uniforms, we survived LeMay’s planet-ending advice. If we want to survive future crises, we have to hope that the next president learns from Kennedy’s attitude toward the military and from the SNAFU and FUBAR principle—but not from Cruz’s bomb-throwing bluster.
Take Ted Cruz. Most of the talk about him after the most recent Republican debate was about New York values and natural born citizenship. But let’s not forget that the Texas senator, whose resume includes brilliance in debate but not a single day in the military, began his performance by blindly defending sailors who had strayed off course and gotten themselves captured by the Iranian regime.
“Today, many of us picked up our newspapers, and we were horrified to see the sight of 10 American sailors on their knees, with their hands on their heads,” Cruz said. “In that State of the Union, President Obama didn’t so much as mention the 10 sailors that had been captured by Iran.”
What did Cruz want Obama to say? As a volunteer speechwriter, maybe the senator would have put these words in the president’s mouth: “Our brave sailors got lost, strayed into another nation’s territorial waters, and are being released. But we are going to bomb Iran anyway, to help Ted Cruz find out if sand glows in the dark.”
If Cruz had spent any time in the military, he’d have learned about its capacity for error. It was service members, after all, who invented the unsubtle acronyms SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fouled Up) and FUBAR (Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition), to describe the everyday reality of life in the armed forces. In this case, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter admitted, the sailors in question fouled up the basic naval task of navigation. The Iranians held them briefly, then let them go.
Not good enough for Cruz. “I give you my word, if I am elected president, no service man or service woman will be forced to be on their knees,” Cruz said, “and any nation that captures our fighting men will feel the full force and fury of the United States of America.” In other words, he’d reject the delicate negotiation that led to a bloodless result. Instead, he’d bomb first and ask questions later.
The current naval SNAFU would have come as no surprise to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Unlike Cruz, he actually served in the military, in World War II. After a Japanese vessel destroyed PT 109, the small boat he commanded, Kennedy famously and courageously rescued his crew. What we don’t remember as well as that story is Kennedy’s lifelong disdain for the military.
Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek reports that, writing home from the Pacific, Kennedy criticized the ineptitude of his superiors and sneered at what he called the “super-human ability of the Navy to screw up everything they touch.” Later, as president, he came to regret taking the disastrous advice of the intelligence community and the military: Go ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. That failed plan sowed the seeds of the Cuban missile crisis, which almost led to nuclear war with Russia.
Happily for the nation—not to mention the planet—his skepticism of the military continued during the crisis. Wisely, he rejected the advice of Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, whose colorful nicknames included “Bombs Away.” To Kennedy’s face, LeMay said Kennedy’s proposed blockade of Cuba was “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.” LeMay’s idea: Attack Cuba.
Right after that meeting, Kennedy told an aide: “Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that? These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”
These are difficult times to say the military is ever wrong:
- The words “Thank you for your service” have become as obligatory as “Have a nice day.” As a veteran, I feel uncomfortable when someone offers those formulaic words. It’s difficult for me to see how my time in Korea, from 1968 to 1969, as an intelligence officer, really contributed to the safety of the nation. And veterans I’ve asked about this form of thanks also feel oddly uncomfortable with it.
- The Pentagon paid the National Football League millions of dollars to stage honor-the-military events.
- The New York Mets stage military Monday and wear spectacularly ugly camouflage uniforms. Call us camo nation.
- Even House Speaker Paul Ryan, who sat in a near-catatonic state of disapproval through most of the State of the Union, applauded appreciatively when the president referred to our powerful military.
- The mistaken idea has gotten around that we owe today’s military something close to idolatry, because our Vietnam vets suffered a torrent of spit as they returned from war. Actually, President George H.W. Bush gave that notion a boost as he cast about for support for the first Gulf War: If you’re against the war, he argued, you’re against the troops, and they deserve better than Vietnam vets got. That’s just one of the conclusions of a book called The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, by Professor Jerry Lembcke of the College of the Holy Cross, who found no serious justification for the myth.
Despite all that lavish praise, we live in a time when the Pentagon itself reported 26,000 cases of sexual abuse in 2012 alone. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has worked hard to change the way these crimes inside our military get prosecuted, but she has run up against opposition even in her own party. This is not a trivial problem.
None of this is to say that we should treat service members and veterans with anything less than respect.
On their way in, we owe them honesty. They need to know, in starkly clear language, that no matter what recruiters may promise in the way of training for post-military civilian employment, the needs of the service always come first. They may have signed up to learn about computers, but recruiters must tell them clearly that they could end up in multiple combat tours in Afghanistan or Iraq.
On their way out, we owe veterans excellent, accessible medical care and meaningful help in re-integrating into civilian life. As a nation, we should be deeply ashamed that so many veterans are homeless and so many are committing suicide.
In this presidential campaign, can we realistically expect anything like a balanced view of the military to emerge? Probably not. But we must remember Kennedy’s example. Thanks to his refusal to bow meekly to people with ribbons on their uniforms, we survived LeMay’s planet-ending advice. If we want to survive future crises, we have to hope that the next president learns from Kennedy’s attitude toward the military and from the SNAFU and FUBAR principle—but not from Cruz’s bomb-throwing bluster.
The man in the red cap
This was a Facebook post that I wrote a couple of weeks after Election Day 2016
My biggest fears about the results of this election focus on two things: One is thermonuclear war, arising from the pathologically thin skin of You Know Who.The other is the searing pain facing hundreds of thousands of people whose lives are staring into the abyss of sudden separation from their families.
But I also deeply dislike what the election is doing to my mind.
Take the other night, when we shared a meal with friends. Not many feet away, I saw an elderly man—what nerve of me, at 72, to call anyone elderly!—at a nearby table. The first thing I noticed was the bright red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap he wore throughout the meal. Like me, with my Mets cap, he could have simply been hiding a bad hat-hair day. But something told me was wearing it proudly, to demonstrate that he had voted for You Know Who.
Right away, I started disliking him, even though we had never exchanged a single word. Maybe we share a lot of views on baseball, children, literature, and life in general. But all I could think about was his vote on November 8, a vote that has filled me, my family, and friends—and immigrant and Muslim families across the nation—with existential dread.
As I watched him, I couldn’t help but notice his body shape. He had, to put it mildly, the girth of a nation—maybe 300 unhealthy pounds. As I watched, I started involuntarily imagining a different motto on his cap: “Make America Fat Again.” And I kept telling myself, “Stop thinking that!!!” But it wasn’t easy to turn off that nasty notion.
A day or so later, I read that You Know Who, despite his pledges not to change Medicaid or Medicare, is now likely to join the everlasting Republican drive to privatize Medicare. What does privatize mean? It means doing away with the existing Medicare and replacing it with vouchers. That way, people can buy insurance directly from insurance companies.
For Republicans, who think of all businessmen and businesswomen as some sort of superior species—despite monumental business failures like the Edsel, the new formula for Coke, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the demise of dozens of restaurants in your own neighborhood because small businessmen miscalculated the market—the idea of giving this avalanche of new business to private enterprise makes great sense.
For people like me—and probably the man in the red Make America Great Again cap—Medicare is an imperfect but reliable way of navigating the inexorable deterioration of our bodies. So, as I learned that You Know Who might actually be thinking of joining the Republican scheme to privatize Medicare, one part of my brain kept thinking: “Great! For the oldest and frailest of the low-information voters who persuaded themselves that You Know Who would bring about salutary change, the loss of Medicare will be a rude awakening. And it will serve them right.”
This was not a worthy thought.
The man in the red cap, however wrongheaded I consider his vote, looked like someone who needs a lot of medical attention. I shouldn’t be deriving any satisfaction from knowing that the death of Medicare would be the correct fate for someone who was so wrong about an election. So, shame on me. There’s nothing wrong with righteous anger, but the proper target of that anger these days should be You Know Who, the person who deceived millions of people, not the victims of that deceit, like the man in the restaurant.
In the coming presidency—whether it lasts the full four years, is curtailed by scandal, or leads to a crippling reversal at the polls in 2018—we’ll have a lot to worry us, from anti-immigrant raids and the demonization of Muslims to an outbreak of mushroom clouds. On top of all that, as the man in the red cap taught me, without even knowing it, we have to cope with the darker impulses in our own minds, brought to life by this horrific election.
We can’t let the man with the orange hair make us harbor unworthy antipathy toward people like the guy in the red cap. I have to believe I’m not alone in those angry thoughts. And I have to hope that we are all better than that sort of You Know Who-scale anger.
But I also deeply dislike what the election is doing to my mind.
Take the other night, when we shared a meal with friends. Not many feet away, I saw an elderly man—what nerve of me, at 72, to call anyone elderly!—at a nearby table. The first thing I noticed was the bright red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap he wore throughout the meal. Like me, with my Mets cap, he could have simply been hiding a bad hat-hair day. But something told me was wearing it proudly, to demonstrate that he had voted for You Know Who.
Right away, I started disliking him, even though we had never exchanged a single word. Maybe we share a lot of views on baseball, children, literature, and life in general. But all I could think about was his vote on November 8, a vote that has filled me, my family, and friends—and immigrant and Muslim families across the nation—with existential dread.
As I watched him, I couldn’t help but notice his body shape. He had, to put it mildly, the girth of a nation—maybe 300 unhealthy pounds. As I watched, I started involuntarily imagining a different motto on his cap: “Make America Fat Again.” And I kept telling myself, “Stop thinking that!!!” But it wasn’t easy to turn off that nasty notion.
A day or so later, I read that You Know Who, despite his pledges not to change Medicaid or Medicare, is now likely to join the everlasting Republican drive to privatize Medicare. What does privatize mean? It means doing away with the existing Medicare and replacing it with vouchers. That way, people can buy insurance directly from insurance companies.
For Republicans, who think of all businessmen and businesswomen as some sort of superior species—despite monumental business failures like the Edsel, the new formula for Coke, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the demise of dozens of restaurants in your own neighborhood because small businessmen miscalculated the market—the idea of giving this avalanche of new business to private enterprise makes great sense.
For people like me—and probably the man in the red Make America Great Again cap—Medicare is an imperfect but reliable way of navigating the inexorable deterioration of our bodies. So, as I learned that You Know Who might actually be thinking of joining the Republican scheme to privatize Medicare, one part of my brain kept thinking: “Great! For the oldest and frailest of the low-information voters who persuaded themselves that You Know Who would bring about salutary change, the loss of Medicare will be a rude awakening. And it will serve them right.”
This was not a worthy thought.
The man in the red cap, however wrongheaded I consider his vote, looked like someone who needs a lot of medical attention. I shouldn’t be deriving any satisfaction from knowing that the death of Medicare would be the correct fate for someone who was so wrong about an election. So, shame on me. There’s nothing wrong with righteous anger, but the proper target of that anger these days should be You Know Who, the person who deceived millions of people, not the victims of that deceit, like the man in the restaurant.
In the coming presidency—whether it lasts the full four years, is curtailed by scandal, or leads to a crippling reversal at the polls in 2018—we’ll have a lot to worry us, from anti-immigrant raids and the demonization of Muslims to an outbreak of mushroom clouds. On top of all that, as the man in the red cap taught me, without even knowing it, we have to cope with the darker impulses in our own minds, brought to life by this horrific election.
We can’t let the man with the orange hair make us harbor unworthy antipathy toward people like the guy in the red cap. I have to believe I’m not alone in those angry thoughts. And I have to hope that we are all better than that sort of You Know Who-scale anger.