Category Archives: Americana

Egypt and Afghanistan

Americana, Current Affairs, Obama, War

Egypt-protests2

It seems to me that what we are trying to do for the Afghans – free them from a repressive and backward regime – the Egyptians did for themselves. Or, at least, are trying to do for themselves. And because they fought for freedom themselves with some of them dying and a lot of them making sacrifices, they have a much better chance of getting it. Because Americans are the ones dying for freedom in Afghanistan, the Afghans have almost no investment. Why should they.

If, in 1776,  an 100,000 man French army had come to the Colonies and got rid of the English for us, I think our commitment to democracy would be different. If all we did was wait for the French to win and then they said Here is your country, I doubt we could have made democracy stick.

In Egypt, I read, people are cleaning the streets, Tahrir Square is clean. The Egyptians are taking pride in their country.  We had to take control of our country and, I am afraid, the Afghans will have to do the same.  We can't do it for them.

A couple of days ago, Michele and I watched the HBO movie, The Battle for Marjeh. We were both taken by the fact that the Americans were doing most of the heavy lifting, the Afghan Army seemed expert at always being where the action wasn't.

People say that Afghanistan is the graveyard of Empires. I don't think that is true. To quote somebody -Tom Ricks, I think – We'll eventually leave Afghanistan to its fate, but it will be because we've finally figured out that the stakes there aren't worth the effort, especially given the low odds of meaningful success.  It's just taking us longer to figure that out than it should.

I think the real question is If everything were the same in Afghanistan except we weren't there, would Obama commit 100,000 troops? I doubt it. 

The Joy of Informal Language

Americana, Evolution, Psychological Musings

I started out titling this post "The Joy of Simple Language" but, in taking about it with Michele, she pointed out that I was really talking about Informal Language and, infact, what I was looking at as simple is actually complicated. I had it backwards.

I used to be in an men's group. We met every other week for years and we had all sorts of rules on how to be in our group. Among the rules was Anything the we say in the group stays in the group.  When one guy told us he and his wife were expecting a baby, none of us told our significant other. Rules were rules. Eventually, we dropped all the rules except To be in relationship to what we do in the group and to each other. With no rules to slavishly follow, being in the group became much more complicated.

Language is that way.

Intuitively, we all – I – think that the language of primitive people is simple. We all know that cave men said things like Uga or Ugh and not I want to tease out the real meaning in the cave being empty.  And that may be true, but earlier languages are simpler because they are more formal than our language. They have more and harder rules. Latin is almost impossibly complex but it is easy once you memorize the rules.

English – American English – is losing rules every day and it had a lot less to start with.  I think that is so thrilling.

It is easy to follow a rule like Never end a sentence with a preposition, but it results in a sentence like About what are you thinking? rather than What are you thinking about?  As English losses its rules, it becomes more complex as well as less formal. There is more room to play. To understand tease  above, we have to see it in context. We have to be in relationship and that is the Joy. 

 

 

The power and joy of a book

Americana, General U.S. Grant, Psychological Musings, War, What's a man?

One of the nice things about being in the hospital is having time to read. Several weeks ago, Richard Taylor sent me a list of books – he had run into – on the Civil War and that started me reading A Stillness at Appomattox.

Civil War blog

Reading this book has been painful at times, but – mostly – a joy. It is painful because it is paragraph after paragraph and page after page of General U. S. Grant sending men into the meat grinder of battle and a joy because it shows the slow change – with so many acts of grace and horror – of Grant’s Army transforming into a winner.

But the book is primarily a joy because of the power and beauty of the words. It is almost 400 pages of poetry. Here is a paragraph from page 213:

…There had been that dance for officers of the II Army Corps, in the raw pine pavilion above the Rapidan on Washington’s Birthday, and it had been a fine thing to see; and it had been a long good-by and a dreamy good night for the young men in bright uniforms and the women who tied their lives to them. Most of the men who danced at that ball were dead, now; dead or dragging themselves about hometown streets on crutches, or tapping their way along with a hickery cane to find the way instead of bright youthful eyes, or in hospitals where doctors with imperfect knowledge tried to patch them up enough to enable them to hope to get out of bed some day and sit in a chair by the window. There had been a romance to war once, or atleast some people said there was, and each one of these men had seen it, and they had touched the edge of it while the music played and the stacked flags swayed in the candlelight, and it all came down to this, with the drifting dust of the battlefields blowing from the imperfect mounds of hastily dug graves. 

 

 

 

I realized this evening – with some sadness – that I don’t know one person in the military.

Americana, Current Affairs, War

Mississippi-Flag-Memorial

I was in the Army for three years and all I knew were people in the army – and a few Air Force – now I don't know anybody. It is a shame and – in my humble opinion – a blot on our country that we – most people – have been able to take no no part in the carnage we want other people to do in our name.  Maybe, if we all had to take part, we wouldn't have as many wars.