The Chuck Hagel Rants - Part the Third: What is it this time??

The honeymoon is definitely over. What is it with these Republican? They're going to filibuster a war hero, a man wounded in action twice? And all because he dared to call the Iraq war what everyone else in American except John McCain and the hard right fully understands - that it was a monumental piece of stupidity? Or is it because some Republican staffer made up this group called 'Friends of Hamas' and spread the word that they and Chuck Hagel are BFFs? Or is it because the Republicans are now basically the evangelical party and their base is absolutely convinced that unless Netanyahu gobbles up all the West Bank, then the end of days will never come, and if the end of days never comes they won’t get - dang, I forget the word! - yanked up out of their cars and through their kitchen windows by the Anti-Christ or whomever and fly on up to heaven while the rest of us poor suckers – including, I assume, Jews, who (sorry Pat Robertson) aren’t going to be magically converted to Christianity on that day - just sit around down here wondering where the crazies went, while secretly breathing sighs of relief that come what may we might at least now have some sanity in our government? Is that it?

The Repubs are beneath contempt. A short while ago Bobby Jindal said the Republicans would never be back in the majority until they learned to stop being the Party of Stupid. Given the events of this past week, I think liberals (and this Eisenhower Republican) can rest easy for a while longer.

The Chuck Hagel Rant - Part the Second

I was prepared to work myself into a lather over further Republican intransigence on the Chuck Hagel nomination.  Our buddy and heroic Gulf War veteran Senator Lindsey Graham (who served his country sitting at a desk in South Carolina processing wills for soldiers who did deploy) says “Chuck Hagel is out of the mainstream on most issues regarding foreign policy.”  That's fine, if by mainstream you mean current Tea Bag, Evangelical Christian, Neo-Con borderline insane foreign policy positions, then yeah, the man is way out of the mainstream.  But so, I hope, are most Americans after a decade of ill-advised war.  At least this Eisenhower Republican / Obama Democrat is.  I prefer a little - what's the word - oh yeah, realism in my foreign policy.

Anyhow, as I said, I was prepared to write a diatribe, when I happened to stumble on a speech Chuck Hagel gave at the University of Nebraska almost six years ago.  The man seems plenty real and plenty mainstream to me.  Some excerpts (the snotty parenthetical remarks are my own):    

"In the Middle East of the 21st Century, Iran will be a key center of gravity…a significant regional power. The United States cannot change that reality.  To acknowledge that reality in no way confuses Iran’s dangerous, destabilizing and threatening behavior in the region. Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism and provides material support to Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist groups. Iran publicly threatens Israel and is developing the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. Iran has not helped stabilize the current chaos in Iraq and is responsible for weapons and explosives being used against U.S. and Iraqi military forces in Iraq (yeah, the man sounds like a milquetoast, doesn't he?).

Our understanding of Iran is limited and incomplete. We have not had formal diplomatic relations with Iran for nearly three decades. Diplomatic contact at all levels is severely limited. We have no constructive military contact. Economic ties remain essentially severed as well. There is deep distrust and suspicion on both sides regarding intentions and motivations. Put simply, the United States and Iran do not know one another. This unfamiliarity, distrust, and lack of engagement risks producing disastrous consequences. When countries do not engage, the risk of misperception based on faulty judgments spawns uninformed and dangerous decisions.

The United States needs to weigh very carefully its actions regarding Iran. In a hazy, hair-triggered environment, careless rhetoric and military movements that one side may believe are required to demonstrate resolve and strength…can be misinterpreted as preparations for military options. The risk of inadvertent conflict because of miscalculation is great (Remember World War I, anybody?).  The United States must be cautious and wise not to follow the same destructive path on Iran as we did on Iraq. We blundered into Iraq because of flawed intelligence, flawed assumptions, flawed judgments, and questionable intentions (the man's a born diplomat, he didn't say 'out and out lies').  The United States must find a new regional diplomatic strategy to deal with Iran that integrates our regional allies, military power and economic leverage."

Sorry, Lindsay (and John McCain) but the man sounds eminently reasonable and - dare I say it - mainsteam to me.  And the man got two Purple Hearts - always a plus in my book.  That's as compared to Senator Graham, whose Gulf War wounds consisted of hemorrhoids from sitting at that desk all day long (yeah, I've got 'em too, Lindsay, and damn do they hurt - maybe not as much as a bullet, but ouch!  I feel your pain, fellow veteran).

Said my piece.  And now, back to the taxes.

Garveys and Guns - It's Complicated

My late father was a sportsman.  That term had a particular meaning back in the ‘40s, ‘50’s and 60’s.  It didn’t mean he played basketball (the man was 5’ 5’’ for God’s sake) or sat on a couch Sunday afternoons watching football.  It meant he took to the woods and fields each November, and for men of his generation, taking to the woods in the late fall involved rifles and pistols and shotguns.  It wasn’t remarkable, or questioned, it’s what Midwestern guys did – they went hunting, or if it wasn’t hunting season, you found them knee deep in cold, running water, stalking the wild trout.  And if they weren’t hunting or fishing, they were reading about hunting and fishing.  Dad had dozens of outdoor magazines lying around the house, things like Michigan Out of Doors, The Michigan Sportsman, Game and Fish.  I believe I even saw a few copies of American Hunter from the National Rifle Association, back from the time when Wayne LaPierre had his own hair and the NRA hadn’t turned batshit crazy.   No one thought it unusual, or evidence of a flawed character.

In fact, the only character flaw in the Garvey household was my own – I couldn’t stand hunting.  It wasn’t so much the killing – which didn’t happen all that often – but for me, hunting was 1) boring and 2) cold!   We didn’t have the nice synthetic / cotton blend thermal long johns back in the ‘60s when I was invited to join the men out on the back 40.  No sir, what they had were good ol’ prickly union suits you wore under baggy corduroy pants that you tucked into cracked, rubberized boots, which you attempted to insulate with three pairs of wool socks.  You wore a wool shirt, a couple of old sweaters, and last year’s good coat that you grew out of, all of which bulked you up to the point you looked pretty much like Ralphie’s kid brother in “A Christmas Story”.  And I still froze.  I quickly began looking for any excuse to avoid the annual trips Up North.  Eventually, Dad stopped asking.  Thank God, my brother Glenn – the next in line in the Garvey brood – took to it with the same zeal as the old man.

But the thing was – and is – that while I hated the cold, I loved to shoot.  Bing, Bang, Boom!  Music to a kid’s ear.  Dad took me skeet shooting a half dozen times over the years, and it turned out I wasn’t half bad.  Of course, I haven’t shot skeet in something like 16 years, not since the summer I was failing as a manager at the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand, yet somehow got included in a department outing to a private club in the middle of Lake St. Clair.  I spent the time being my usual embarrassing self, sucking at three hole golf, nearly falling down a ladderway on the partner’s yacht, spilling lunch on the new walking shorts my wife got me especially for this occasion.  Late in the afternoon, the partner took us over to a wooden walkway built along the shoreline, where some of the club attendants had lugged a couple large metal trunks.  He unlocked one, reached in and pulled out a polished, oiled shotgun.  There were four of us, I recall.  Each got a gun and a little box of shells.  One of the club house guys stood behind us and launched little clay discs out into the lake.  And I nailed ‘em.  By God, I nailed ‘em.  Everyone else got one or two; me, something like eight out of ten.  No one could believe it.  One day of glory out of four miserable years.  They let me go the following spring. 

But I digress.

 This last summer, Pat and I visited our son Rob, Captain W. R. Garvey, at Whiteman Air Force Base outside of Kansas City.  He had a little treat for me.  Bright and early Sunday morning, we drove a half hour out into the countryside to a local firing range.  It was nine, nine thirty in the morning, and already 90 degrees.  The place was tres rustic, a field of dried-out weeds surrounded  by trees.  It had three shooting lanes, each with a wooden table at one end and a big mound of dirt to catch the shots at the other.  One was short, one was medium, and the third was long – although I can’t remember the lengths.  The short lane was already in use by four young men Rob recognized as part of the security detail at Whiteman.  A thin, ancient, bent over man in bib coveralls had taken the long one.  He had a cardboard box set down about twenty feet in front of him, and was proceeding to shoot it with the smallest pistol I have ever seen.  The studs to our left, on the other hand, were equipped with serious firepower.  They had two rifles and one short, thick, black thing with a removable magazine sticking down below it.  The sounds around us went plink, plink, boom, boom, KAPOW!!  And when the dust settled, plink, plink, boom, boom, KAPOW!! again.    

 

Rob’s weapons were more mundane, a Ruger 22 caliber rifle with a 10 round magazine, and a Beretta M9 with a clip that holds 15 rounds if you squeeze them in, but usually no more than twelve.  (And yeah, Wayne, I’m using ‘clip’ and ‘magazine’ interchangeably – so sue me, it doesn’t make one damn bit of difference to what I’m writing.)  According to Rob, the Ruger is a "classic" rifle that a lot of kids learn to shoot on, and the M9 is the government-issue sidearm for officers.  Both are semi-automatics.  And way, way more fun because they were.  If I could’ve fit a 30 round clip / magazine / bullet holding thingie to the Beretta, it woulda been even more fun.  And I’m guessing I’m not the only person feels that way.  Couple the fun part with the Midwestern (or name your region) hunting ethos, and a general ‘mind yer own goddamn bidness’ attitude’ and you get an idea where some of the reasonable resistance comes from.   Of course, I’m omitting the Tea Party, Second Amendment-er, mouth frothing, Obama-is-a-Muslim /  fascist / communist-aching-to-deliver-this-country-to-the-devil contingent that drives the rest of the resistance.  My fear is that the combination of the two will be enough to stifle any reforms.  And unless those fighting for change can win over the reasonable opposition, we may be in for a couple more Columbines, Virginia Techs and Newtowns before we get serious about changes to gun laws. 

There, said my piece.  Now back to doing the damn taxes.   

The Chuck Hagel Rant, Part the First

I was using the new iPhone at work this afternoon to surreptitiously surf the web and see what was up with the Chuck Hagel confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense.   (So sue me, beloved current employer, why else do you have a guest network, eh?).  What a farce.  Is there anyone - ANYONE - left in these United States besides John McCain and six Republican senators who thinks the Iraq war was anything other than an unmitigated disaster?  4,488 of our sons / daughters / mothers / fathers killed.  Thirty three thousand wounded.  Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed.   Ethnic cleansing of Sunni and Shia, not to mention Christian and Jew.  $757.8 billion spent in direct cost alone, per Pentagon estimates, which don't include the billions spent on indirect costs like servicing the debt on money we borrowed to pay for the damn thing.  And for what?  So W could prove he was just as much of a man as his father?  So Dick “I had other priorities” Cheney could make up for blowing off the Vietnam War?  So we could overthrow a secular dictator who hated Islamic terrorists, and who waged a ten-year war to the death against Iran and the Ayatollahs?  (A war that ended in a tie, but you get my drift.)

 But Saddam was a murderous tyrant, you say.  And it is our moral duty to depose murderous tyrants!  Well, if that were the case we would've invaded half a dozen Central American countries where we installed our own thugs, wouldn't we, Senator McCain?  Or maybe Egypt, and gotten rid of Mubarak.  Dang, didn't see us doing that, did you?  It's like the saying goes - he may be a bastard, but he's our bastard.  And if you only off the bastards you don't approve of (a policy I happen to approve of) then you surrender all pretense of morality, and by the way, welcome to the world as it actually exists.   

 The worst of it, in my jaded view, is that we took a “force in being” and turned it into a force in reality, and for no good reason.  A force in being?  It's a play on an old naval term - a fleet in being.  A fleet in being, as in Kaiser Bill's Germany early in the 20th century, is a couple dozen big ships with big guns sitting in a harbor and maybe occasionally sailing out to sea for a firing exercise and then returning to port to drink schnapps and eat schnitzel.  The mere fact of this fleet and the threat that it might be used drove the English mad with worry.  Until, of course, war came, and despite early losses, the Englanders figured out how to master the Germans, and the High Seas Fleet ended up scuttled at the bottom of Scapa Flow.  It's the same on land.  A big, powerful army is at its most imposing and fearful before it is used.  Once it's in battle - especially a battle far from home - if the enemy can last long enough, it figures out that army's weak spots and begins to hold its own.

In my view, that's what happened in Iraq:  we took the world's most powerful force in being, turned it into a force in reality and proceeded through a series of incredible blunders to end up looking less like the liberators we assumed we were, and more like your garden variety conquerors, i.e.:

1. Not stopping the looting after Baghdad fell,
2. Dismissing thousands of Iraqi army officers and civil servants because they were members of Saddam's Baathist party, even though a man couldn't get a decent job in Saddam's Iraq if he wasn't a Baathist - thank YOU, Paul Bremmer - thus destroying the two groups we needed to help keep the country under control, and
3. Locking up and abusing prisoners in Saddam's old torture palace (an excellent piece of P.R. - NOT!)

All of which gave the opposition - and there were bucket loads of opposition - time to figure out our weak spots.  They could never defeat us, but we could never quite defeat them.  Until, of course John McCain's beloved surge.  Was it a success, the surge?  Yes or no, Senator Hagel?  Yes or No?  Yeah, John, it was a success.  That plus the Sunni Awakening in Anbar Province plus U.S. military payments to Sunni leadership (nothing like bribing your enemy to lay low - another tactic I heartily agree with) allowed us get out of that hell hole with a semblance of honor.  And in that, Johnny Boy, the Surge succeeded.  But in nothing more.
 

Up North

And always capitalized, as every good Michigander knows.  Where Up North begins is a matter of some conjecture.  For some, it's hard and fast - the 45th parallel of latitude, which cuts through Michigan at the tip of the ring finger.  The line runs through Sutton's Bay on the west shore of the Grand Traverse, reportedly bisecting the griddle at the 45th Parallel Cafe.  For others, it's the Mackinac Bridge, another seventy-odd miles to the north.  But for Pat and me, Up North is more a state of mind than a line on a map.  And states of mind - especially at my age - can be a little fuzzy.  There's a point on M-127 north of St. Johns where the road narrows and you come to Uncle John's Cider Mill and maybe stop for a break.  If you get out of the car when the wind is blowing just right (by which I mean due south from the Straits of Mackinac, still 200 miles away) you may sense something different in the air: a molecule or two of something tangy and fresh mixed in there with the stale coffee and the diesel fumes.  You're not quite Up North, but you're getting close.  And so you keep driving and you notice - actually, now you're looking for it - that there's pines, and spruce and junipers lurking around in the oaks and maples on the side of the road.  You are definitely closer.  You pull off onto M-115 for the diagonal 50 mile shot into Cadillac, and then somewhere on that two (occasionally three) lane road as you close in on the Manistee National Forest, you sense that you've crossed the divide.  Your breath comes easier.  Your heart rate goes down.  That tang in the air is palpable.
You pop some oldies into the Malibu's CD player and sing along with Don and Carol and Carley and if you can find it, Revolver.  Then you turn north at Mesick and 15 minutes later you're driving through Buckley, and you turn in your seat to tell Pat about the twin sisters from Buckley who won a trip to Shanghai for a modeling competition and got so drunk on the plane that it turned around in the middle of the north Pacific and the crew kicked them off in Fairbanks, and Pat just listens and smiles even though she's heard the same exact story every single trip for the past ten years, both on the way up and on the way down.
Another thirty minutes and you hit the far south end of Traverse City and continue on until you bump into the Bay and you 'oooh' and 'aaah' at the blue water for five minutes while you turn left and left again at Tom's Market and then start the mile drive uphill, and you don't even remember to curse the fact that Pat talked you into a ridiculous little four cylinder engine, which presently sounds like it's tearing itself apart while every other car on the road, and a guy on a bicycle, passes you by.  You head west, past a few gas stations, and developments that - thank God - never ever got developed, and the lone home of the proud mother of three Marines with a flag pole for each and then, if it's spring, you look into the ditches and the shade at the side of the road, and there's the trillium - first dozens, then hundreds of them, delicate white flowers growing in the grass and weeds.  If by now you're totally in the Up North zone you miss the abrupt turn that points you to Glen Arbor, but if you're truly in The Zone, you don't care 'cause it's a state of mind - not a state of miles - and you keep going straight because you know the sand dunes are somewhere ahead of you and they will be glorious because they're always glorious.  If you made the turn, though, then it's up the hill, past the scenic turnoff that hasn't had a decent view in 50 years because of the riot of trees, then up and down and down some more until the stop sign, then the right and immediate left across the bridge that separates the two Glen lakes, then through the woods next to Glen Lake and past the houses - some from the turn of the last century, some from the mid - until the road opens and Anderson's Market appears, along with - if you're lucky, a fox or a deer.  You catch a glimpse of Lake Michigan as you turn left, but it disappears in the trees as you take M-22 west, not certain whether you want to speed up and get there ten seconds sooner, of just enjoy the ride.  Then you see the sign on the side of the road.  It doesn't say Up North.  It doesn't need to.  You slow down and take the winding, quarter mile drive through the tamarack.  You get out of the car.  You breathe.  You smell pine needles, bark, water.  You stretch.  If you are not completely in The Zone, you unpack the car.  But if you are, you leave the car - unlocked! - and run to the front of the house and then down through the dune grass and the sand to the narrow wooden walkway past the fire pit almost to the beach.  You may find you have your camera in your hand.  If you do, you take a picture.  If you don't, it doesn't matter.  Nothing matters.   For a week, nothing will matter.  You're Up North. 

Glen Arbor, MI.  November 2012.  Late Afternoon
 



THE DOG DAYS OF WRITING

It's August and even the prolific Michelle Scott is struggling to put words to screen.  I belong to a writers group on Linkedin where someone started this thread of 'tell me the first two lines of the book you're currently working on."  Which sounds a whole lot easier than actually writing those two lines.   But personally, I don't think two lines - even great ones - can sell a book, but a paragraph?  That's another story.  So, since I'm as stuck as Michelle, let's see if this already written opening paragraph does the trick.  Just fill out the little comment thingie at the bottom of the post.  And I hope you and your dog have a real nice August.

Nightfall in Neuilly

   SYLVIE DELACOURT USED HER MOBILE PHONE five times the February night she was killed.  France Telecom logged the calls at 2:17, 2:23, 2:29, 2:46 and 2:51 in the morning.  The calls were placed from her car as she sped down the A-1 from Charles de Gaulle to her apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the chichi suburb that abuts the 17th arrondissement, separated from Paris only by the Périphérique, the insanely clogged highway that circles the city.  The first call was to her audit colleagues in Ciudad Juárez, the second to her office in La Defense, the third to the agency that handles her apartment, and the last two to Christopher Reardon, her lover.  She told the auditors she was not returning to Mexico, her boss that she was resigning immédiatement, the agency that she would be out of town for an indefinite period, and she twice begged Reardon to take an earlier flight to Paris.  All five calls rolled to voice mail.  The auditors were at dinner, the boss asleep, the agency closed.  And Reardon?  He was in an outdoor hot tub on the snowy shores of Lake Michigan, making love to a tall blonde named Karen

POLITICAL THEATER

AND POLITICAL COWARDICE - my own, I'm afraid.  Tuesday was primary day here in Michigan and Pat and I trooped on over to Riley Junior High after work to cast our votes.  (They call it 'middle school' now, an artsy fartsy affront to the millions of us who suffered through JUNIOR High School in our brush cuts and dorky banlon shirts and musical corduroy trousers (and don't mistake them for pants, 'cause they weren't pants...  no sir, pants were cool, the Beatles wore pants, trousers were what our fathers wore, and goddamnit, that's what they made us wear, us poor little geeky twelve year olds in black corduroy trousers with flecks of bright color in the fabric like maybe there were little red fire ants crawling up our legs, and there you were, these innocent little ex-elementary school kids mixing in with fully hormonal fourteen year olds - girls with honest to god breasts, and guys like John W (I don't even dare write his name because even though he's got to 70 by now, he will come and find me and beat me to a pulp) who was in his mid-20s and enjoying his fifth or tenth trip through 9th grade, and he drove to school - DROVE TO SCHOOL! in a car with more horsepower than all the teachers' cars combined, and he reeked of cigarettes, and had a girlfriend who was way way beyond training bras, and who gave us poor little twelve year in corduroy trousers a brain freeze so bad we'd either smash into the walls, or into John the W himself, who'd growl at you and then toss your body through the nearest window.  That my friends, was JUNIOR high school, so don't give me any of that middle school crap!)

But I digress.

We found the end of the gymnasium where our precinct voted and we stood in a not very crowded line and the nice poll workers had us fill out the voting cards - and there it was down in the left bottom corner.  Two fill-in-the-ovals asking me if I was a US citizen.  Ruth Johnson,  Michigan's Secretary of State, is apparently so concerned that illegal aliens are going to hijack our elections and maybe, by god, vote democratic or something, that she needed one final check to ensure that only god fearing US citizens are stumbling through the ballets, despite the fact that even George W. Bush couldn't find any creditable evidence of voter fraud, and that our Republican governor, Rick Snyder, told her to knock it off. 

So, I decided to get on my high horse and not fill in the circle.  I handed over my driver's license and the card and the license proceeded down the line of pole workers until this middle-aged woman pointed to the card and said I had to fill it out.  And I said 'no', very loud and distinct, saying I was a US citizen and this was unconstitutional.  She looked confused and said, no, I need you to sign the card.  Upps.  So, I signed the card.  And then she said, I needed to fill in the circle, yes or no.  Then I repeated myself, standing on principal.  She allowed as she could call 'headquarters' (wherever that was) and check.  I thought that a fine idea, but people were starting to come in and I was holding up the line, so I said, fine, I'll sign.  I voted (solidly democratic) and we left.  But I felt like I let myself down.

Many of my liberal brethren seem to think this whole voter fraud issue was designed to keep down the Latino vote.  Me, instead, I think this was specifically designed for the white, middle-class, middle-aged voter, to remind him (usually it's a him, women being a heck of a lot smarter than us guys) that there's all these Mes'cans and 'others' out there and they vote for the Democrats, so don't be an idiot, vote the party that looks like you - Republican.

So, later I was at home nursing a middling Cabernet when my daughter Susie called and said she'd voted, and when they told her to fill in the circle, she told 'em it was illegal and she wouldn't do it.  The poll worker said she'd call headquarters.  Susie said, go ahead.  The worker did, and the worker said, 'you're right.'  No circles were darkened.

I went to bed feeling that my daughter was a better freedom fighter than I was.  I later read in the online versions of the Freep and the Detnews some comments to the effect of 'come on, it's just one little line, quit with the political correctness'.  Yeah, it's a little thing, but I seem to remember all the Rush and Sean wannabees saying never to give in!  The road to the Kenyan, socialist, hate America, gay, black, basketball shooting dictatorship is lined with giving in on little things.  So, no more giving in.  So, a warning.  Don't be in line behind me if those little circles are still there in November.

Now back to doing the damn laundry