Category Archives: Politics

Gay marriage in the Marines

Americana, Politics, Uncategorized

According to Time Magazine, The Marines’ top legal officer has told all Marine lawyers that the corps will not support Marine spouses’ clubs that discriminate against same-sex couples….The Marines made clear discrimination isn’t an option they’ll entertain. End of discussion.

I think that most people – intellectually – know that the military is not a democracy, but I don’t think that most people really – emotionally – understand that, in the military, you do as you are told. It is not like a job, where you can leave if you don’t want to do what they tell you to do. In the military, basically, you do it or you go to jail. Of course it makes sense, many people would decline if hitting the beach first on D-Day were an option, but in runs deeper than that.

My first day in the Army started at 5 AM with a Sergeant – who I later learned wasn’t really a Sergeant but a National Guard Reservist Private First Class acting as a Sergeant –  waking us up by banging on a metal garbage can with a stick and screaming Get the fuck up. Of course we did, scared shitless,  and it made sense for us to get up. But, sitting here and knowing that he really wasn’t a Sergeant, I am pretty sure that – after the first couple of times, atleast – he didn’t really want to get up, at what ever time it took, to get us up at 5 AM.

Everywhere I went in the Army – until I became a Sergeant and the rules imposed on me changed – standard getting up time was 5:30 AM to get to work at 8 AM which was usually only a couple of hundred feet from where we slept. Nobody said being at work at 8 AM is the goal and do what you have to to be on time, the goal was getting up when we were told to. We could complain, and we often did, but we got up.

After three years in the Army, I went back to college at Claremont in Southern California. At the time, Claremont had a policy – regime? program? – that required graduating seniors to pass two major tests to graduate. One was a one day test in our major and the other was a complicated, general, Comprehensive Test in which we were give a list of five books to read – and a week to do so –  and three days to answer the general question that constituted the test. The – hopefully – graduated seniors thought that it was unfair to pass every class four four years and then be washed out by failing an arbitrary, essay,  test. This being the 60’s, the seniors held a meeting to vote on protesting the Comprehensive Test by not taking it.

There were about an half dozen vets in the Senior Class. We were all older and we all knew the “reality of the real world”. We vets all spoke against and voted against the protest and the rest of the class voted for the protest. I was sure that Claremont would just say Fuck You, Get Out if we didn’t take the test. If this had been the Army, they would have put us in the Stockade but this wasn’t the Army so I figured they just wouldn’t graduate us. My mindset was an Army mindset, if somebody orders you to Jump, the only permissible answer is Yes, Sir! How high? End of discussion.

So, in 1948, when President Harry Truman ordered the military to desegregate, the military desegregated – grumbling and slowly because much of the military culture was Southern – and it was fully integrated by the Korean War. When I was in the Army in El Paso during the early 60’s, I could have a beer with a black guy in my local on-base enlisted club but not in town. I was not in El Paso when the civilian world caught up with the military but I expect to be around to see the the civilian world catch up with the Marines. It will be very nice to see.

 

The Ironic Election II

Politics, Psychological Musings

The conventional wisdom is that Romney lost the election for alot of reasons – fellow Republican’s boorish behavior towards women that bleed into public perception about Romney, an inability to identify with people outside of his class, being forced by the primary to go anti-Hispanic, his refusal to release his taxes and information on his offshore bank accounts, his robotic demeanor, and on and on – but incompetence was never on the list. He did save the Olympics after all ( yea! sure! with $400M in Federal help, but still).

I suggest that  incompetence should be at the top of the list,  incompetence driven by hubris. For months, leading up to election, the Romney campaign had touted their super high-tech voter monitoring operation to use on Election Day. It would identify which of their committed supporters have voted so they could then get the slackards to the polls. This super high-tech voter monitoring operation was called the Orca Project. Orca because the Obama operation was named Narwhal and Orcas eat Narwhals (cute, huh?).

In theory, Romney is against centralized government and centralized power but, they centralized Orca, controlling everything from Boston (in contrast, the Obama organization pushed the control of their GOTV – get out the vote or ground game – way down the food chain). When Election Day comes, the precincts start sending tons of data to Boston and Orca crashes. What a shock. The structured, tightly controlled, Romney organization is left without a head and like any very structured, tightly controlled, organization with the head removed, it becomes almost useless. Months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on over-centralization. Meanwhile, the decentralized Obama Organization preformed flawlessly.

As an aside, Romney also thought their precinct workers – mostly members of conservative religious groups – would be more numerous at 36,000 and much better motivated than the Obama precinct workers who they thought were mostly professionals (read mercenaries, I think). Why anybody would think this after 2008 or after spending five minutes thinking about Obama as an community organizer – maybe it is related to Rudy Giuliani’s comment Community Organizer? What’s that? – is beyond me. I would think that a numbers guy would realize that 36,000 is smaller than the Obama’s estimated 8,000,000. End aside.

Meanwhile, John  McCain skipped the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee briefing on Benghazi to hold a press conference complaining that he was being kept in the dark about Benghazi and it was a cover-up. What a douche.

Finally – I hope, but probably not – Romney confirms that it wasn’t his fault he lost the election. He says that his team ran a “superb” campaign with “no drama” and he only lost because Obama gave “gifts” to blacks, Hispanics and young voters.

The Ironic Election

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

 

 

It comes down to numbers. And in the final days of this presidential race, from polling data to early voting, they favor Mitt Romney. Karl Rove in the WSJ.

This is what happens when people who don’t know the facts can vote. An after election tweet from a surprised – shocked, really –__fill in the  blank__ completely missing the irony of not knowing that Obama had been leading in the polls for weeks.

….BTW,  one of the more confusing election statistics is the reported 3M conservative voters who did not show up and vote for Romney. I have no idea how to approach understanding this situation. from a couple of emails from an Conservative acquaintance.

Looking at the fantasy map, above, seeing how many states Romney had to win to get the Presidency  I realize – even more – how difficult a time Romney was going to have to win the election. But every strong Conservative I talked to – by email, usually – was surprised by the result. Most were astounded. Stephen Colbert often remarks that Facts have a liberal bias. and that was a bias that the Conservatives refused to see. Romney and Ryan were promoted as numbers guys, promoted as the nation’s saviors  because they were realists. In the end, they were wrong.

They were wrong because they didn’t – or couldn’t – see the actual numbers. They had, along with their fellow Conservatives, lost track of reality.

I have seen this before; in 1966, a Republican actor, Ronald Reagan, ran against two-time governor Pat Brown for governor of California. As the election got close, all the polls showed Reagan leading but my dad, who was a close friend of Brown and one of his biggest fans, thought Brown was going to win in a landslide. In 1966, polls weren’t as accurate as now, but they were accurate enough so that it was obvious to me that Reagan was going to win, but my dad was only looking at the crowds from inside the bubble. This election, the Conservatives were looking at the data from  inside the bubble on a national scale.

That is better, I guess, than Peggy Noonan who thought Romney was going to win because he had more yard signs. Yard signs, it turns out were not the way to predict an election and I would have thought Noonan would know that. But I think that the right was predisposed to ignore all the signals.  Not just the polls but the advantage Obama had in thousands of Obama for America ground volunteers (a Community Organizer, after all, should be pretty good at organizing communities).  Not just the volunteers, but the increasingly large demographic advantage. Not just the volunteers and demographic advantage, but a campaign staff that really knew their stuff. That checked on reality five times a day.

Bleeding heart Liberals are supposed to be unrealistic but the Obama campaign was a hard-headed, tough, ass kicking machine and, very importantly, that is what the soft-hearted Liberals wanted. When Obama did poorly in the first debate, every Liberal I know, complained about it as if it were a personal affront, when Romney did poorly in the second debate, every Conservative I know thought he did great. The Liberals didn’t want to feel good, they wanted to win and, this time around, the Conservatives seemed to just wanted to feel good (they hated Obama so much, I think they thought it would be easy to beat him). Eventually, even Fox’s Megyn Kelly couldn’t take the right’s pundit bullshit anymore, asking Karl Rove if his blather about the number-crunching was just “math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better.”

 

 

Veterans Day

Americana, Politics, War

Korean War Memorial at the western end of the National Mall, Washington DC       

Washington is full of war memorials; it makes me sad that there are so many. On the east end of the Mall, is the The Ulysses S. Grant Memorial  facing toward the Lincoln Memorial at the west end. They unite the Mall like they united the country. In between are newer monuments: World War II, The Korean Conflict – named Conflict or Police Action so Congress didn’t have to vote for it – The Vietnam War. We are becoming an Empire, filling our capitol with memorials to our distant, empirical, wars.

It is nice we honor our Veterans – I am a Veteran and am proud of it, maybe too much at times, considering that I have never heard a shot fired in anger – but I fear that the Honoring is covering up national policies we shouldn’t have. I fear that the Honoring is covering up the debate and discussion on whether we should even be fighting these wars. I fear that the Honoring is covering up our neglect of the shattered bodies and psyches that are the waste products of these empirical wars.

In all the wars, in each war, young men and, now, women – or old boys and, now girls,  depending on your point of view – have been sent to distant places by old men to kill people whose names they don’t know and, in most cases, can pronounce. They are sent to places we don’t really know or understand. It is not making us great, it is not making us rich, it is not making us safe.