Who's Got Obama's Back?

Unike the Tea Party, which was born when the alien/socialist enemy held all three of Washington’s elected redoubts, Occupy Wall Street inhabits a different political world, one whose most prominent figure, the President, has fallen short of not only many Occupiers’ hopes but also his own—in large part because of the Republicans’ conscienceless exploitation of the perverse veto points of the congressional machine.
--Hendrick Herzberg, Nov. 7 New Yorker

Unlike Herzberg, whose commentary I do follow and highly value, I don’t think it’s as important when the Tea Party was born as why it was born. It was born because a black man became President of the United States. When it was born, the Tea Party was full of low information white people who never even noticed what George Bush and the Republicans did to the economy and didn’t know what a debt ceiling was. And they darn sure never dreamed Barack Obama would win the presidency, especially up against such a powerhouse ticket as John McCain and Sarah Palin. But when he did win, they hit the roof. They wanted to go to presidential rallies carrying a loaded automatic weapon because sometimes the tree of liberty needs to be watered with the blood of tyrants and to them Obama was apparently a tyrant though he hadn’t been in office two months. There were cartoons of a monkey shot by cops. They spit on black congressmen as they entered the capitol building. That was the Tea Party, and more sophisticated right wingers harnessed their racist anger and gave them a code to talk in. Republicans invented that code.

Why would the Tea Party declare war on the social safety net that we've assembled for the sick, disabled, aging and poor in this country.

Why would all these Tea Partiers stand for the ruin of the middle class by banks, Wall Street, and the richest 1% (and what proportion of that 1% do you suppose is white?)? Why would they want to cut off all revenue to the government, a completely nutty idea? Why would they oppose health care reform so somebody besides Big Pharma gets well? The reason is the Tea Party is a bunch of low-information disgruntled people who hate people who are different from them, and there is a rope through their nose ring, the other end of which is attached to Karl Rove, George Bush's brain as he was once referred to, and a group of Republican elected officials who never liked democracy anyway. Those elected officials have no plan to say yes to anything. Famously they vote with uniform consistency against bills they know have bipartisan support and that they themselves wrote and proposed.

They were never this obvious before. A black guy in the White House was the last straw. Senseless primitive racial hate has been harnessed in favor of the Republican agenda. This is the last cornered snake in the big barn. It's been in hiding since Martin Luther King's death and we've made progress. You can't say we haven't made progress. Barack Obama didn't win the Presidency by just a little and that event was unthinkable only a very few years before it happened. His election has flushed out some really bad stuff we collectively still have in us. Nobody in our big world of punditry and opinion expressing says that racism is at the core of our problem today. The very fact it isn't being said let's you know how dark this place is inside us. Barack Obama cannot say he's a victim of racism, and there’s nobody watching his back who will say it for him. Black activists in the US know better than to call a snake a snake. If they do, it's "game on" and they're gonna need more than a pitchfork.

That is what we're up against. For the country's mental health, it has to be named, it must be said aloud. It will be painful.

Tonight on Hardball, Chris Matthews was faulting Obama for not reaching out to democratic congressmen and senators. “Why doesn’t he have them over and play cards and have a drink with them and get them to help him?” Chris said, “He needs to be more like Kennedy, skillful at the politics of politics. Why does he try to do all of it by himself?” Chris was selling his book on John Kennedy. Matthews virtually said, “Why doesn’t Barack have a brother right there with him, like Kennedy had Robert kicking ass for him?” Uh-huh. Think about it.

They both got shot.

Why does Barack have to have a drink with congressmen and senators in his own party to get them to fight the Republicans as they, the Republicans, dismantle the system and the middle class on a singular, pre-announced mission to bring down the President using parliamentary stunts to stop everything, everything, every single thing? You know, that's actually a threat to the security of the US -- when the depression really hits, that will be obvious. Do you know this has never happened before? The country is being strangled, and the economy is being intentionally crashed by a bunch of flag waving know-nothings and their quite evil leaders. Occupy Wall Street is the beginning of a giant reaction, a revolution. A massive number of people are losing their jobs and houses, states are going broke, taxes are the lowest ever and are off the table for negotiation because NO is the answer, period. We can no longer afford to have America be America, and the black guy is why. Social security, medicare, people’s retirement accounts, it’s all gonna go. And if the Tea Party and the richest one percent don’t stop it with this crap they're pulling, it is for sure gonna get loud. I'd prefer for us to win the next election and get the snakes outta there that way.

It is shocking how little empathy is being shown to anybody, and I think that is one of OWS's main issues. Republicans are cold. People this cold are very dangerous. It's okay with them if people remain unemployed another couple of years or decades. People in democratic districts all across the country, let alone in Republican districts, are not being represented, their pain isn't pain, it's just discomfort. Wounded veterans home from Bush’s dumb wars will be jobless and desperate and, pretty darn soon, pissed off. Why does Barack Obama have to play cards with senators on his own team so they get behind the jobs act and fixing infrastructure and not killing public schools? Why aren’t the democratic senators and congressmen raising holy hell? Cat got their tongue? Why don’t the democratic senators and congressmen have the President’s back, I mean in a Giant Ted Kennedy way? In fact, if they can’t get by the filibuster, why don’t they just walk out (as happened in the legislature in Wisconsin) -- pull on their jeans and get some earmuffs and flock down to Wall Street themselves? Their usefulness in their elected office seems over. Getting whipped like that by Republicans would make me awful mad, if I were in there. I'd go down and join the protest. But if the democratic elected officials are stumped and can't do anything, including can't raise hell, that pretty much explains why they've left their president swinging in the wind by himself.

Or, can it be that congressmen and senators in both parties, in significant numbers, are part of the 1%, and/or are inextricably in bed with the rich? Is the system that fucked?

Occupy Wall Street is positive it is.

They, therefore, don't want to be co-opted by, associated with, or pigeon-holed by any party. They certainly don’t want to get swallowed by business-as-usual do-nothing politics in Washington and find themselves up against the expressionless dim gaze of Speaker Boehner. They want action and now they will force it. It's getting cold out. They blame Wall Street for the crimes that gave us a brush with a world depression, a close call that is still a close call, but trust me, for a lot of these people it IS a depression, and yes they blame Wall Street but also they blame the Republicans -- they’re basically the same machine, just two different interconnected parts of it. And they do have each others' backs.

I hope somebody in the Occupy movement realizes that Barack Obama is a very well-placed ally for what they want to accomplish, the best and best-placed ally they could ever have. But divided we cannot stand, and we have been successfully divided. If OWS wants Mitt Romney to be president, and John Boehner and Mitch McConnell to have a victory parade in 2012 which the Occupy movement can watch from a tent city somewhere in a warm climate, they should hurry off and find a third party candidate who in their daydreams can do so much better against congress than Obama has done alone, and we’ll all lose and the country will make Karl Rovian "progress" backwards to the glory days of Calvin Coolidge when human beings and dinosaurs dwelled the earth together..

Instead, OWS should meet with Obama this week, play cards with him and have a beer, and they should plan to crush those democracy-hating bastards in 2012 and get us going again -- 99% is a lot of people. Hopefully the Republicans won't be able to stop a significant number of them from expressing their will at the polls, one of their more telling anti-minority, anti-democracy, anti-constitution conspiracies that for some reason nobody can do anything about. Jesus.

Anyway. We have a fully functioning progressive articulate and ready to move on the issues that brought OWS into the streets. In fact, in his famous September speech to Congress, he invited this uprising, he said get up, get out and express yourselves. It was his only choice, to by-pass congress and call on the people for action. Now, for weeks he's been sending signals to OWS that he wants what they want (he's been working around congress by signing executive orders because nothing can get done at all unless he does). OWS needs to go see him. There is still time. They don't need to distance themselves from him like everyone else has. By no stretch of the imagination is he the problem. OWS should walk a mile in Barack's shoes. Occupy the White House, see what it's like being America's first black president.

Japan and the Daydream of Good

I was watching Japan dying today on MSNBC, and in other news, was so very happy to hear the Right Wing champing at the bit to invade Libya. They were mad at the President for inaction. They never saw a war they couldn't afford, these people who are so worried about "entitlements," health care to the less fortunate, and balancing the budget. When it comes to helping people, including Americans but most obviously people in foreign countries, suddenly the old anal retentiveness sets in and they get that addled look my dog gets when I want him to crap and it's raining. We can't quite think what to do when it comes to helping. We send in 74 guys from the elite Task Force 1 from the Fairfax, VA fire department, with rescue and recovery dogs. We send in some ships with some aid, and some helicopters, but ultimately this “help” says more about our inability to conceive of the size of the disaster. Why don't we invade Japan with help, swarm over the debacle, with tents, water, blankets, food, boatloads of medical personnel, soldiers to clear the debris and rebuild. Send the Army Corps of Engineers. Draft people into service to go help. Draft Glen Beck, I’m sure he’d be willing to serve, and I’d serve right beside him. Are there only 50 brave men and women on the planet to pour water on those melting rods, but an unlimited number to play shoot 'em up in selected small dictatorships and kingdoms we've tolerated for years but that now have us in a bad mood? Isn't intervening in this disaster a more important endeavor than kicking the snot out of another tiny country with overwhelming military force? Isn't there a strong argument that saving Japan from a most horrific ruination is more important? Remember "Right to Life"? Remember "Family Values"? Remember "Christianity"? Remember true heroism? Remember international trade and the stock market? Doesn't Japan right now present us with a 21st century opportunity for a new model of global leadership, one that doesn’t include killing people? If we can even contemplate another war, why can't we motivate ourselves to save lives and help an ally with fervor equal to or greater than bombing and shooting? This is our chance to unHiroshima our Karma and square ourselves with modern history. Here's a chance to do something we can all agree on with that untouchable defense budget; here's a chance to do combat with global disaster. We need to start getting good at it, because the disasters are getting bigger and I’m almost certain our national lucky days are numbered. Why can't just once we be an overwhelming force for humanity and the Greater Good like we think we are in our dreams?

Argentina and the Southern Cross

We arrived in Argentina June 21, a few hours after it turned winter there. While Bali is about 10 degrees south of the equator, Buenos Aires is 35 degrees south. One evening in San Antonio de Areco, where the gaucho picture above was taken (there were festivities going on and I was putting the dodge on dancing), several us went out far out away from the out buildings on the ranch and, standing next to the fence for a giant pasture, we looked up and scanned the sky to see if we could spot the Southern Cross. I didn’t know what proportion to look for. Would I have to sort of glue it together in my mind like I do the Big Dipper, or would it jump at me at a glance, like Orion’s belt. Well, it jumped at me. The Southern Cross hangs in the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere like a crucifix on the wall at home when you were growing up. I know, not everybody's Catholic, but 92 percent of Argentina is. It is a beautiful, stately four star configuration (technically five star but the key cross figure is the four points you’d expect to form a t shape). It was not small but it was rather compact, so the entire effect of it hits the eye at once and with startling force. That was the evening of our first night in the country, after eleven days in the city, Buenos Aires.

Most of the people in our group knew cities, and Buenos Aires is beautiful and European in flavor, but it's a typical city in more ways than not. While Argentina is big in square miles, almost half of its 36 million people live in the city and province of Buenos Aires. Suffice it to say, it was good to get out of town.

Like Bali, probably like the US, too, if I think about it, in some sense Argentina has become an attraction, a tourist stop-off, and when you go there, there are, as they say, places to go, things to see, and like a good tourist, you check them off one by one. The result is seeing the Argentina someone has fashioned for you to see, like a photograph of it instead of the thing itself. In fact, progress has taken the country beyond gauchos and the tango, and, as in the US, the new generations are making their own new Argentina, but part of that new Argentina is that many people are employed to show these artifacts of Argentina's past to those who come visit and to represent them as Argentina. The Buenos Aires tourist literature tells you where to go for tango lessons and to see "real" gauchos. In Bali, you can read in similar literature where to go to see quaint villages, and when you get to them, there they are being professionally quaint and performing the Bali version of quaintness. It's okay. There is a real Bali, with amazingly beautiful people, but they know new money when they see it and are lithe enough to go for it. Somewhere there is a statistic about the money being made in Bali, and at the top of the list of activities that make it, you won't find rice farming. If that's how human beings worked, there would still be a lot of Americans interested in 4-H and running a hardware store in Kansas. No, there's a lot of money to be made on the story of America. There's a whole town in South Dakota that exists on the historical concept of Wild Bill Hickock, promoting the myth and selling U. S. Marshal's badges with a Colt .45 sized hole in them, nevermind Bill was shot in the back. Nevermind Argentina is past gauchos, the Balinese don’t love poverty more than they love tourists, and we in the new Americana are past cowboys and Indians. As Bali is willing to risk rapid deterioration of its beauty in order to sell its beauty to a withering stream of tourists, the US is willing to forgive the ruination of the gorgeous waters of the Gulf to keep the oil flowing in its veins. I digress again....

But do I? If I really went out into that pasture to see the Southern Cross for the first time, what was even more awesome than that constellation was the night sky itself. We’d been in Buenos Aires quite a while and the sky, as above all modern big cities, was dulled out and muted by ambient light in polluted air. Out in the country, away from lights, the sky was sparkling and pristine. I’d been terribly worked up by the Gulf oil spill, and I didn’t realize how much so. I think I began to believe nothing was clean and bright anymore. When was the last time you looked at the Milky Way, our galaxy? The pasture gave us a big flat gentle winter breeze, the great smell of the land, earth, like we remember it, a sky so vivid you could almost imagine we hadn’t yet ruined everything for ourselves. The irony. If word were to get out about the beauty of the sky at the edge of this beautiful pasture somewhere in Argentina, the inevitable would happen again – we’d go there in droves, stomp it, pave it, buy postcards of it.

I'd go back to Argentina. I'd try to find a writing place there, far enough from the city that ambient light wouldn't snuff my hope, close enough so I could get into town and see the art. The only way to get through the skrim of self-conscious promotion of an image of real Argentina (or anyplace) is to live there a while. I am curious and want to see Argentina's really real life, its day to day people and work and art and stories. You and I know there are great stories there -- in fact, though the lens will be different, we probably even know what those stories are. Half the fun is knowing they're half universal, half so specific to this beautiful country they could take place nowhere else.

I’ve been writing stories set in these places I’m visiting. As with the Bali story, I'm finding myself writing an ex-patriot fiction (I can’t get myself to presume to write from the point of view of a store-keeper in Ubud or a young person from the pampas now living in a suburb of Buenos Aires, so the ex-pat gambit is on again), and even so there's research to be done so that the story is organic to Argentina. Research. The core lesson of writing (for me) always elbows its way forward as I'm industriously making notecards and loving "information." It is: write the story while researching. The story can't be mulled and figured out in advance, and thus what well-targeted research is needed can't be predicted -- in novels this is, or could be, different. In stories, the story itself will arise from the writing of it. I'm sure there's a metaphor for this in the tango. In the metaphor, one of the dancing partners is the writer, the other is the writing on the page. And, you know, it switches back and forth. :-)

Bali

I've been working on a story set in Ubud, a sort of artists' community in the southern center of the island. Many expatriots have flocked to Bali, and Ubud is the place of choice for most who do. The challenge of my story is to fully realize the little I know and the lot I feel about Bali. We say in writing that often "place" is a character, influencing the goings on of a story in its unique way, such that the blend of place and people and "what happens next" makes a unique potion that would be fundamentally different in all ways if you simply changed the place. In theory this is obvious, of course. Place changes everything. But once in a while, as on this trip, the idea hits with force. My challenge is to make Bali organic to the story.

The religion of the island is key to all things there. It is lived and breathed. The island is not diverse. The Balinese are 92 percent the same as each other. Among their many challenges, one is not having to deal with competing interests from immigrants. They do have to deal with progress and development, as tourists storm the island, but the Balinese have to a large extent changed themselves to grow their incomes and their island economy -- have changed themselves from poor rice farmers to entrepreneurs finding ways to cash in on world interest in their island. Of course big development is there, in the south central part of the island, Denpasar and environs. The environment in the tourist places is being spoiled by litter and high demands for water and land.

Inland however the burgeoning population is focused on work, family, prayer, and community. People have motorbikes for transportation, and they have their cell phones and their ipods and their blackberries and the flat screen TVs. Their villages are very old, many of them, and some are new and fairly modern. As progress arrives, it is religion and family that enables the culture of Bali to hold steady. The women are strong; the men are resourceful.

Cooperation and togetherness, a respect for others, is real and apparent. If someone on the crowded streets (motorbikes by the thousands, not many cars) happens to pass a car and on-coming traffic is close, the driver being passed slows down and the passing vehicle is allowed to duck into the left lane. If that vehicle couldn't get in in time, the oncoming vehicle simply moves over so all three cars can pass each other three abreast, no problem, happens all the time. The slow down and stop for pedestrians as well as dogs and chickens and motorbikes parked with their rear ends on the right of way. No one gets annoyed. They simply watch out for each other and yield to one another appropriate to the situation.

In my very few days in Bali I witnessed the famous Balinese generosity, smartness, and goodness. That's the big news I got from being there. I might have begun to think those qualities were disappearing from the earth, and they aren't. I know exactly how this will work in my Bali story.

July 17, 1969 -- Welcome to the United States Army

You might take a look at this wonderful NY Times chronology of 1969. You'll note below that my memory has drifted from the actual calendar dates but the spirit of the Times piece is the same idea as below, that 1969 was packed with stuff we'd never forget, and Walter Cronkite and the Times are who told us about it. Check it out.

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/arts/20090717-1969-feature/?hp
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I try not to take history personally. But Walter Cronkite, who as a news anchor, along with Eric Sevareid, embarked in the Sixties on giving us the nightly body counts from the Vietnam war as a way to put pressure on the administration to think a little bit about the terrific horror that was going on in Southeast Asia for no reason anybody could name, died yesterday, 40 years to the day after I was spirited out of Tuscola in the dead of night to serve my country. I was drafted by my lower jaw, like how you pull a Northern Pike from the water after he bites. A whiner by temperament, I had opposed the war with letters to the town newspaper but I was unable to make my opinion stick with moral action when it came right down to it.

Our group of draftees, many players from my Little League team, who had gone on to graduate from college but got nabbed right after they took off their graduation robes, and younger kids, the 19 year olds who were raised with Midwestern values and lacked the wiles to dodge the draft, were driven triumphantly out of town at midnight on a bus for Chicago where we all had our induction physical in a warehouse somewhere featuring the all-important finger up the ass, metaphor not lost on any of us. Yes, it was 15 months after the ’68 Tet offensive, after which even Robert McNamara knew it was all for naught, but nevertheless there we went, up into the sky from O’Hare to Columbus, Georgia to begin basic training.

The army then was fat, corrupt, and stupid. My drill sergeant attempted to sell me amphetamines on the firing line while we were practicing shooting our M-16s. At home everyone was going through the motions of peace, with a fairly nice economy, while we, the select few, were bound for Southeast Asia, some to die. We forget why. It was war inertia. Nobody could figure out how to get out without admitting that it had been a stupid murderous nutty vile Kafkaesque devil’s spiral of lunacy from the start. Please for fun try to think of one good thing that came from it except an inspiring war memorial with 58,000 or so dead boys chiseled on it. Untold thousands more slept under bridges and in the woods after their return; some are still out there.

Walter Cronkite, who was constitutionally unlikely to express his opinion in his role as a journalist, visited Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, roughly February of '68, and upon his return finally broke out on Feb. 27, '68 with an editorial in favor of negotiation and opposed to the continuation of the dying. Robert McNamara was out of a job by March 1, and Johnson declared he would not stand for re-election. Cronkite proceeded to begin closing his very important CBS Evening News program with US and Vietnamese body counts. That’s what they called them. Body counts. It was hard even then to see how the body counts could be accurate, but on a given evening you might see this on your TV screen:

Body Count:
US – 109
Vietnamese – 1254

Nightly!!

For those without an iota of conscience, including very reverent Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Quakers, Mormons, Moonies, Jehovah's Witnesses and Nazarenes, that count might have looked like impending victory. How many Vietnamese could be left? Surely we were almost done with them!

When the Tet offensive hit, which was a suicidal mess for the North Vietnamese but had huge impact on the US because we didn’t know they still had the heart, let alone the numbers, to raise a ruckus like that that late in the war – when Tet hit, everybody knew the war was a failed futile mess. That’s why peace candidate Eugene McCarthy was gonna win the presidency, we thought, unless Bobby Kennedy, seeing that Eugene would win, wanted to hop in himself, and then he damn sure was gonna win, unless he got killed while campaigning. Most Americans still didn't know where Vietnam was, but it was pretty clear they weren't gonna topple America since they didn't have one single plane or boat. People in this country wanted the war to be over. Nixon whipped Humphrey because Humphrey was VP during the Vietnam debacle. Nixon could get us out of Vietnam, he told us.

That was a little less than a year before I was drafted. Well, it turned out we were only about half done from a US body count point of view. Nixon pushed for Peace with Honor, how ironic, which meant more war, a lot more, including the bombing of Hanoi on Christmas, tons of fun stuff, and, oddly, no "honor" at all. Just embarrassment. We were wrong. We lost. We were stupid. We kept slaughtering and being slaughtered long after everything was obvious except the reason why. Presidents with daughters kept sending other people’s sons off to die. It was amazing. I'm serious, it was like a collective mental disease episode, not one single logical thing about it. We couldn't get out because we couldn't get out because we wouldn't get out. This is where that special use of the term "quagmire" came from, if you ever wondered.

And, as Cronkite would say, that's the way it was -- that’s what kind of happy horseshit was going on when I was drafted July 17, 1969. I was at Ft. Benning for roughly 60 days. What happened during that small window of time, all dutifully reported by Walter Cronkite each evening? The day after, while I was getting my head shaved, I watched Ted Kennedy, wet from a long swim at Chappaquiddick, remorsefully talking to the press. Because of this he would never be president. Three days after that, we landed on the moon. We troops sat in folding chairs on sand outside our barracks watching it on a small black and white TV. A few weeks later, a beautiful famous actress, Sharon Tate, and others were killed in a really nasty cult murder, Charles Manson and the gang. Aug. 14, wearing fatigues of green, I turned 23. Aug. 19 Bill Clinton turned 23, and in Wrigley Field's outfield in the middle of a ballgame, two hooligans were about burn the American flag. Dodger centerfielder Rick Monday, otherwise forgotten since, rescued it unharmed to a standing ovation. Elsewhere, Woodstock was happening. We watched it at the USO while we played pool. Hordes of kids our age swarming along a country road in New York State, love, peace and rock’n’roll.

Not us though. We were cannon fodder. It wasn’t even the luck of the draw, because there wasn’t yet a draft lottery when we were drafted. (The first one was a few months later.) I’m not still mad about it! It’s a few wars later, and I’ve seen it happen over and over. It is terribly primitive, bloodlust, conquering other nations, slaughter. I always loved the bumper sticker “War is menstruation envy.” I don’t think that’s too far off. Something unconscious is taking place, something Freudian I'm almost certain. We go into war so easily. Republicans, particularly, love it. They hate abortion and would deny it to a woman under almost any circumstances, and are particularly grossed out by partial birth abortion because they value life so much, but the random bombing of a major city, including the killing of women some of whom might be pregnant, does not give them one moment's pause. For this one thing, you can even raise their taxes!

And we can never figure a way to get out of a war short of blasting the enemy to smithereens like Hiroshima. Short of that, a war just drags on, peters out. Since the end of the Cold War, there’s not been much external to ourselves that has threatened the existence of the United States. We did get surprised when a Hole in the Wall gang pulled off a suicide mission that exceeded even their fondest dreams. They got us pretty good, and we never got them back to our own satisfaction because, why, well, because, well, a cat bit us and we decided, rather mysteriously, to avenge it by kicking the dog. It didn't really matter if we actually got the people who got us. What mattered was that we rush to get into a war that was fairly big, kill a society or a country, get the blood splattered and fire off some weapons and make the very heavens themselves regret hurting us, by raising hell, literally, because we are good, good people, not like people in other countries, most of whom are ignorant, can't speak English, are not favored by destiny to use all the world's oil, and aren't white like God.

But listen. Allowing myself to be drafted was my first but not my last serious moral lapse. And then what happened? -- I never went to Vietnam. They sent me to Germany, where I was a clerk and a shortstop on the company softball team. This is my kind of luck. I kept bitching about the war until one of my friends told me to stop. “Shut up,” he told me. “Our generation is dying in Southeast Asia and you’ve got a cushy gig. Shut up.” I saw his point. I can't see it now, but I did then. My wife came there to be with me. We toured Europe when we could take some leave and then later more extensively, after I was excused from active duty, that would be 38 years ago to the day, July 17, 1971. That day we drove our new sky blue super beetle out of Frankfurt, drove a long way to St. Moritz and slept in a tent on the high shoulder of a mountain. In the morning, 38 years ago today, July 18, my wife and I walked higher into the mountains until the meadows were full of snow, then back down, making plans for the future, talking, trying to purge the shame and olive drab out of our blood. I turned 24 in Paris (hence the Paris picture down below, not taken back then but later). I turned 25 in Athens. I saw Barcelona, Rome, Vienna, Venice, Split, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, London, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, so much more. In our travels in Europe, I saw the battlefields of WWI and WWII, astonishing expanses of headstones in rank and file. I saw ruined castles along the Rhine. The Frankfurt opera house was still a bombed out hulk from 1944, along with houses up and down that street.

You begin to realize the big picture. Things look quite rational day to day in our neighborhoods, perhaps. But big picture, we’re grasshoppers, not very bright collectively, doing what comes natural which is, mostly, eating the earth and killing each other for the rights to have more earth to eat. Under a thin veneer of civilization fathers still want their sons to put on the uniform and bravely die so they can cry and bury them and have their chests burst with pride. We know now this can't go on forever. We're rattling our own cage now. It's just a matter of time. When it all ends, we’ll be why. And I proved long ago, July 17, 1969 to be exact, that I'm completely in the flow, not one bit above any of it, I know.

But anyway, happy July 18. This is, sad to say, the deadliest month so far in Afghanistan. We need to hire an architect and get the next memorial wall going.

A nod and a toast to my fellow draftees who went on this day 40 years ago. Rest in peace, Walter Cronkite – you will be missed. I’m writing, and I’m trying to figure how I can get to Paris for a year when my sabbatical comes. I'm fairly green, I'm praying when I think of it, exercising and eating right. I can do better at things. I'll try. I have great kids. It's been a long 40 years and a short 40 years. I shouldn't have let myself be drafted. I honor those who were drafted and served, whatever honor means, whatever "serving" means, and those who didn't by whatever wiles they used, their rich daddy with privileged entre into the National Guard, twisted knee, CO status, color blind, gay, Canada, running and hiding, female, or jail. It's a rough goddamned world. If we need forgiveness for the past, we've got to do the forgiving ourselves. If we want peace, we'll have to make it. Hell yes things could be worse, and will be -- that's for sure --, but meantime I'm quietly planning ahead for sabbatical, trolling for a small place in Vezelay or sweet small apartment in Paris with a view over the river toward Sacre Coeur.