Category Archives: Americana

The esteemed military and Bradley – scratch that – Chelsea Manning

Americana, Current Affairs

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While we were in Idaho, admiring the Boise River, Richard Taylor emailed me an article – and article might not be the right word here – from the Pew Research Religion and Public life Project that was titled Public Esteem for Military Still High. The article started with Americans continue to hold the military in high regard, with more than three-quarters of U.S. adults (78%) saying that members of the armed services contribute “a lot” to society’s well-being.

I am astonished that Americans hold the military in such high esteem. Maybe I should say that I am astonished that Americans hold the military in higher esteem than teachers or doctors. I am astonished that twice as many think the military contributes  a lot to society’s well being as feel that way about clergy. My first though was, Obviously, none of the them have been in the military. From my very limited direct experience of three years in the Regular Army – RA, all the way – and my obsessive reading about the same, I feel safe saying  that the only people who are in the military are people who see no other way out of where they are and people with a sort of idealized patriotism.

Some of the people who joined to get out of where they were, do so and move on, some do so and stay. Some of the patriots – for lack of a better word – get disillusioned and get out, some get disillusioned and stay. The military has always been a, slightly to considerably, distorted vision of America writ small (depending on the size of the war or peacetime force).

That writ small part is important, because the resultant inbreeding adds to the distortion. There are some very smart people in the military and even more stupid people, there are some people who contribute a lot to society’s well being and more who don’t contribute much of anything. There are a huge number of people who respect their fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines and a much smaller, but large, number who rape them. With near impunity, apparently.  Last year, there were about 19,000 sexual assaults in the military and only 96 went to court-martial.

db130822And then there is Chelsea Manning. In an idealized world, I like to think he would be treated as a whistle blower and the criminals he exposed would be prosecuted. In the real world, however, exposing your bosses almost always results in the whistle blower getting the punishment, especially in the military and when classified documents are involved. Bradley could have been executed, he could have been locked up for life in the ADX Florence supermax in Colorado. Instead he got a judge that tossed out the Aiding the Enemy charge. He got 35 years with the possibility of parole after twelve years with 4.5 already served. He got the military at its best.

Maybe that is why Americans hold the military in such high esteem, at its best it is very, very good.

 

A couple of shots and thoughts from the car along the way to Boise Idaho

Americana, Travel

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(For some strange reason, when I tried to put this on facebook a couple of days ago, it didn’t take.)

Google maps tells me that the trip from Michele’s family cabin in Olympic Valley, California – where Aston and Eileen picked us up at about 7:15 AM – to Ophelia and Peter’s home in Garden City, Idaho is 465 miles and should take 7 hours and 34 minutes driving time.  Most people will tell you that it is a boring drive. Google is about right and most people are more or less wrong.

We get coffee in Truckee and head east to The West. After clearing the spectacularness of the Sierra Navadas, we follow the Truckee River – past the Mustang Ranch, surrounded in cyclone fencing with concertina, looking unhospitable as we thought when Michele and I pruriently drove by years ago – until it turns north to its sink at Pyramid Lake.

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Then we drive out into a flat nothingness of the Humboldt Sink surrounded by distant, hazy hills. Driving up to Tahoe the night before, we could smell  smoke and the moon glowed faded red. Now the whole Humboldt Basin seems full of smoke.

Boise-6-3We are in an air-conditioned BMW sitting on leather cushions and breathing filtered air as we watch the Humboldt Basin slide by as if we were watching it on TV. The California Trail passed through here and people actually walked across this wasteland. Between 1848 and 1855, almost 150,000 people walked it – at a pace of around 15 miles a day – carrying their belonging on ox carts as part of the biggest migration in human history. (In 1850, when California became a state, the official census said 92,597 souls lived here; by 1860, the population had jumped to 379,994.)

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The most severe part of their journey was from Salt Lake City to Reno and the scarcity of water was probably their biggest worry. Our biggest worry is where to stop for gas and we decide on a truck stop west of Winnemucca.

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From the truck stop on, we are driving in increasingly clearer air, giving us a clear view of 7200 foot Auburn Peak in the East Range. Maybe twenty or twenty five years ago, Mike Moore bought an old US Air Force Radar Station on Auburn Peak and named it Radar Ranch, he sold it sometime later and it is now for sale again for only $200,000. It has a concrete block main building, an artist studio, lots of water storage, electricity, and a 360° view of the world all the way to the edge. Check it out.

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When we turn left at Winnemucca, it begins to feel like we are almost there even though, intellectually, I know we have another four to five hours of driving.

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First we have to climb out of the Great Basin which we do at Blue Mountain Pass – 5293 feet – after we crossed the border into Oregon, then we run along the top of  a high plain. The fire off in the distance reminded all of us that this is a early and busy fire season.  We drove by fires in California and the weather forecast for Boise predicted heavy smoke. When we got to Boise, one of the main topics of conversation was the evacuation of Sun Valley and Ketchum because of fires. The red state west is in a drought and it will be interesting to see what that does to their perception of Global Warming, or Global Change if you prefer (I read today that Florida Republican Congressman Jeff Miller says that God is changing the climate, not our pollution, so maybe that is the answer and I guess it is OK to keep up these long road trips).

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We are now in the Owyhee River Basin and start talking about what we are going to order when we get to the Rock House Espresso and Ice Cream Parlor in Jordan Valley, Oregon. Jordan Valley is a neat and tidy oasis with a nifty coffee house.

Boise-1486This was our last stop in Eastern Oregon, and the old part of the town seems so orderly, that I was pretty sure this was a Mormon town, but it turned out that it was settled by  Basque(s?).

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To be continued.

 

Clinton, Obama, and a Unified Field Theory of the Outsider

Americana, Obama, Politics

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I grew up feeling like an outsider, I don’t know why, really, but I did and it left me with a disdain for the ruling elite – the longer ruling and the more elite, the greater my disdain, Saudi princes are high on the list for example – and, of course, I desperately want to fit in, even to be part of the ruling elite. When Michele and I were in India, while we were staying at a bed and breakfast Royal Castle, I had the chance to photograph the mini-Maharajah – called a Rao, I believe – who owned the place. I did everything but genuflect. All my disdain was gone and all that was left was conditioned deference. I was in the sun and his highness was in the shade and I was sweating so much I was worried the camera might squirt out of my hands.

When Clinton ran for president as the new, young, energetic, leader and, then, after winning, nothing really changed; I wondered why. He was an outsider, the son of a single mom, from Hope Arkansas and I expected him to understand that America was heading in the wrong direction. Unions were getting weaker, good jobs were going overseas, the rich were getting richer and everybody else was just limping along. In many ways, Clinton just seemed powerless, making little changes around the edges while the tide of American prosperity continued to run out. It seemed like a time for bold action and Clinton was cautious.

The next guy, George Bush the Younger,  brought bold action. He said things like I am going to use my political capital and we all laughed. And then cried.

The came Obama and I had such great hopes. Obama ran on bringing change – real change – to Washington and I believed him. The son of a white mother who had once been on welfare and an African intellectual who went back to Africa, he was almost the definition of an outsider. During his campaign, he seemed to understand the country from outside the Washington bubble. I thought It will not be business as usual, and I was so wrong. As Gary Young editorialized in The Guardian, When given the choice of representing the interests of those who voted for him and the interests of American military and economic hegemony, he chose the latter. That’s not the change people believed in.

Obama ran on closing Guantanamo (or Gitmo, as we have learned to call it). Gitmo is still there, the prisoners are still there and now Obama’s administration is force- feedings the detainees. Candidate Obama wrote about smoking pot – when questioned if he inhaled or, like Clinton, only pretended, he said that he inhaled, That was the point –  now his administration is going after California pot dispensaries at a higher rate than Bush. Obama ran on bringing transparency to Official Washington, and he has gone after more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined.

That is not to say Obama is a complete bust, far from it, by all rational accounts, he is an excellent establishment president.  It is just that he has not been an agent of change, not in the way either Roosevelt was, or Bush, for that matter.  I wonder why. Again

It seems like a pattern. It is easy to say that they are both Democrats and Democrats are pussies, to say that Democrats are too reasonable. That Democrats are Liberals and too willing to see the other side. I don’t believe that. I think the pattern is that both Clinton and Obama were outsiders. For Clinton or Obama to rise to power from where they started, they had to fit in. I read somewhere that black people have a much better sense of white people than the reverse because they are observing white life – in detail but from the outside – where white people are completely oblivious to black life and the same is true of a guy from Hope Arkansas. 

As much as Obama – and Clinton – wanted to make a change when they became President, they found themselves in a world that they knew of more than knew and, even if they were critical when running, it is a world they admired and wanted to fit in. True, it was a world they thought they knew, but only from the outside, it is not a world they inhabited. It is a world they have been conditioned – for lack of a better word – to fit into. It is also a world, in which it was very easy to be intimidated when they actually got there. No matter how critical Obama has been at the lack of transparency in Washington when the Director of the National Security Agency says We can’t release this information, it is classified, it would hurt the country, he goes along. 

Bradley Manning

Americana, War

Bradley ManningBefore, I start I want to acknowledge that Bradley Manning has much bigger attachments than most people and that includes me. He is one of the few people in the world that have been willing to make a huge personal sacrifice to do what they think is right.

Carol Burnett once said that Comedy is Tragedy plus Time. I think a corollary of that might be A Hero is a Traitor plus Time. Maybe you don’t think Bradley Manning  is a hero – although I think he is – and the judge has already ruled that he is not a traitor by throwing out the charge of  Aiding the Enemy, and it is still too early to look at Manning and see reality through the fog of our own preconceptions, but he has exposed to light a dark part of our National Character.

Today, most people think that Daniel Ellsberg, if not a hero, was a patriot and a positive contributor to our collective history.  But, that is now. In January of 1973, he was thought a traitor by the government and brought to trail under the Espionage Act as well as charges of theft and conspiracy. He would have gone to jail for up to 115 years if the judge hadn’t thrown out the case because of government misconduct. That is much less likely to happen in the military court where Manning is being tried.

What Ellsberg did do was embarrass the United States – or, more accurately, the Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy Administrations, or, even more accurately, powerful, people in those administrations – by showing, in Ellsberg’s words, that the [Nixon and] Johnson Administrations had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance. Bradley Manning has done pretty much of the same thing only with alot more documents.

Among  91,731 other classified documents, Manning gave WikiLeaks videos of an American helicopter airstrike in Baghdad in 2007 and an airstrike in Granai, Afghanistan in 2009. Both airstrikes were most likely accidents and both were classified. The 2007 airstrike was  was against a journalist and two other men who were Reuters employees carrying cameras (the helicopter then fired on a van that stopped to help). The 2009 airstrike killed somewhere between 86–147 Afghan civilians (depending on who is counting).

We don’t like to admit that we kill journalists or civilians in our  hygienic wars and, when we do kill them, it often gets covered up. To kill journalists or civilians is embarrassing. I don’t think that making wars and killing seem civilized and controllable is in the best interest of the United States and I don’t think that the guy who exposes these cover-ups  should be put in jail.

Democracy is doomed without informed citizens, says Robert Meeropola, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s son, and I believe he is right. That is where I disagree with the Obama Administration. Maybe I don’t disagree with Obama himself, maybe he really does still believe in the transparency that he ran on. Maybe his administration is going after Manning only because they think they have no political choice, or, maybe they are only trying to cover their asses. I hope Obama still believes in transparency, but I don’t know and have no way of knowing, so I can only hope.

 

Some thoughts while buying tile

Americana, Around home

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A couple of days ago, Michele and I went down to Bullnose Tile in San Jose to get some tile for our bathroom floor. The place was packed and when I asked a sales person if this was usual, she said something along the line of Yea, everybody is remodeling.

It used to be that, as people made more money, they moved to bigger houses. That is the American way. In the 1890’s, or so, most people didn’t even live in detached houses, they lived in apartments or – later – multifamily housing. Even so, except for the very, very, rich, most detached houses were pretty small. Much later, when I first went to work for Shapell Homes in 1971, we -they? – were building homes in Milpitas, less than ten air-miles from downtown San Jose. Our smallest house was 1048 square feet and our largest was about 1850 square feet. Many of the people who were moving into those houses were moving out of 750 to 850 square foot houses in south Palo Alto or Cupertino.

When I left Shapell in 1976, our average house at Kimber Farms in Fremont, was around 2228 square feet. Kimber was about twenty miles from downtown San Jose. When the market crashed in 2008, builders were selling 2500 to 3500 square foot homes in Modesto about 85 miles from San Jose. In a reverse of what had been happening in the United States for the last fifty years, the houses that people are now remodeling are closer to downtown, older and, most likely, smaller than the big McMansions built out in what were the booming exburbs ten years ago.

Now comes what I think is the ironic part, those houses in Modesto are becoming the new slums as people, who can afford it, are moving back into – and remodeling – smaller homes in Milpitas and Fremont. Today, one can buy a nice 2250 square foot house in Modesto for $250,000; that house in Palo Alto – granted a very expensive place where your neighbor might be Mark Zukerburg – would be about Three Million! Palo Alto was never cheap, but lots of areas that were inexpensive are now being gentrified at an alarming rate. Even a 1200 square foot house in what used to be in the barrios of Redwood City now sells for $600,000.

In my imagination, I see a Christmas party in which  people go to the boss’es house that is smaller than their own and closer to downtown. On their one and half hour drive back home, they agree to start looking for a smaller house in Milpitas. Maybe even a house on which I was the General Superintendent in 1971.