Archive for July, 2007

I went out to make my rounds on the Walk late last night, after dark. I had a list of ten names….ten men gone. Ten men given to Iraq and Afghanistan. Ten men whose friends in those distant places are mourning, ten men whose buddies watched the “Hero Flight” take away. Hero Flights are what they call the choppers that come to get the dead; at least some units line up at the flight line to officially say good-bye. It is one of the things I visualize as I walk, singing my way to the center and holding my tears at bay out there.

Ten men whose families are just beginning to grieve; they have yet to face the first holiday that Dad, Son, Husband, Brother doesn’t appear before the dinner table is set for the party. I am the wife of a military retiree, a veteran of Viet Nam is my husband. We met when we were both still Army and later, when he went away for weeks on end on “exercises” with the two Special Forces units he was assigned to serve, I used to put on my “right stuff” face and read my young children home-made comic books about what Daddy was doing while he was away.

Now, as I write down the names in the books I keep…one for Iraq (a new one each year), one for Afghanistan, and one for non-US Coalition troops, I note the names, the rank…and the ages. It shoots me back in my life and I muse on what my life would be had MY husband died at this or that age. This young man was 19; I would never have met my husband, he would have died in Viet Nam and not been in Berlin, Germany to look up from that Harley Davidson to smile at me. Today’s list included an EOD guy who was 29; I would have barely known my husband, he and I barely began dating when he was that age. Here is a man who was 32; what the hell could I have drawn in that hand-drawn comic of mine to let my toddler children understand why Daddy would never tuck them in bed again? And back a few months ago, an officer was 41; at that age, my husband had just bought our first home and got a civilian job and we contemplated a non-military existence. That poor man whose name I copied faithfully will never have that chance, of course. And this name? A reservist called back to active duty at 54; at that age, we were worrying that T. would be recalled because of the first Gulf War.

I find myself crying sometimes as I write down these names. Not only in grief for the friends and families who have suffered a devastating loss, but in shame at my own relief. My husband is 60 now, and the time of recall for him has passed — they can call back a retiree like him until the point where service would have been 30 years. But is there safety, really? Is there really any point short of death when they cannot call someone away from life to do their “duty” for masters in government who never did THEIR duty? One son is home from military service and broken enough that every hobby is gone, every routine motion a lesson in pain; one son is in the military now. Will he ever get out? With stop-loss orders and re-enlistment bonuses to tempt young men into staying; with contractual inactive reserve time that can suddenly become very active indeed………when will my last child be a civilian? Or will I have no reason to cry in a shameful sort of survivor’s guilt—will his name, too, appear in one of my books some day?

The House of Representatives voted today that they do not want any permanent bases built in Iraq. Is the President listening? Does democracy mean nothing to him at all? How long will I be keeping the books of tears and tearing, walking the Walk of loss and regret and rage?

Thinking about high school drama class last week reignited some thoughts I had about philosophy classes I attended and tutored in a  college, oh, ages ago.  Since I seemed to just “eat up” the textbooks and was naturally argumentative, my professor employed me as a tutor for five years or so and had me grade papers and the like as well.   My favorite class to tear up students and work on Frankenstein-like brain transplants (or implants?) was the philosophy of religion class.  My list of  “what the HELL were they thinking” essays is far too long to bore you to tears over; suffice to say EVERY student wanted to convert me.  The sweet faced Islamic student in the headscarf just knew I’d find happiness in submission to Allah.  She wouldn’t quit following me around campus until I rather brusquely told her I would convert just as soon as Allah got off his all-compassionate ass and did something about starving Somalian Muslims, woman-stoning Wahabi Arabian Muslims, genocidal Kurd-murdering Iraqi Muslims, and a host of other hot button issues I have ever had for ANY deity aspiring to what I call “omni” status.  You see, if a deity is going to call him or herself  omniscient, omnipotent, and all good, as well, it is going to take a lot more than the usual C.S. Lewis definition to make me stop slavering for a bite of some preacher’s fat, complacent butt.  Cause I am just that kind of a hard-ass “put up or shut up” sort.  Fundamentalists of the usual Protestant Christian sort who had to take the class for their degree (always under protest, it seemed), contented themselves with smirking and telling me exactly how fast I was going to hell.  Calvinist leaning students were appalled at my brazen announcement that since I was predestined to either hell or heaven ANYway, I was going  do exactly as I pleased—-drink, screw, and as many of the other mortal sins as had any appeal for me to my heart’s content, because predestination made choice irrelevant.  The professor loved watching them try to refute that argument.

He didn’t much like one of my other arguments.  He was an agnostic, but he accompanied his wife to church because of Blaise Pascal.  Now, Pascal was probably not a bad sort, he was the kind of man I imagine you might find at the average cocktail party trying to get folks to stop arguing by finding a happy point of view on both sides.  Pascal thought that if you just couldn’t find necessary proofs of God, you might as well believe anyhow because you stood to win “Heaven” and there was nothing to lose whatsoever.  Poor man, he would stand aghast at how the odds have changed since his century….like many philosophically minded sorts, he was trapped in his own time and couldn’t extrapolate the odds for the future.

Back then, I found it easy enough to tear up Pascal’s famous wager with examples from behind the “Iron Curtain”….Christians in Russia and China didn’t fare so well against the state “religion” of Communism, for instance.  Even if the dead believers were assumed to win the wager with the trump of heaven, others suffered untold miseries. My professor thought that my argument was a bit abusive because it made use of a historical “aberration.”  I thought that history was and is largely a string of one aberration after another, but that isn’t the point here.

Nowadays, were I to go back on campus to shellshock more vulnerable students?  I would certainly use George Bush and the Iraqi War conflagration to tear Pascal to bits.   The odds are far, far worse than mere Marxist dialectic ever could have envisioned.  We have a President who may, just may, in his nightly just-before-drifting-to-sleep moments, envision the Apocalypse of Christian belief as something that will come in his lifetime.  We have a certain sub-culture out there that buys and reads really gruesome novels about just this event.  We have a planet where 1st world nation states are hitting financial rock bottom and even nuclear bombs could be on the block in some dark alley, and even if that is not as threatening as it sounds; we have a nation where corporations are being granted rights once sacrosanct to individuals and they WILL guard their precious prerogatives with every sword available.

So, how does this put Blaise on my hotplate?  Well, we have this continual “war on terror” which sounds bad enough, but in practice it is a rolling disaster of dead soldiers, civilians, and ever-richer war profiting corporations.  First, we went after Afghanistan where nasty Taliban sorts were protecting the architect of 9-11; but somehow George got distracted before that mission was accomplished and diverged into Iraq.  I could speculate on the whys and wherefores of that piece of stupidity, but you have all heard it before—but clearly it was a mistake.  No, wait, I don’t have to be nice here; this is MY blog—lets be really clear: it was a GIANT FUCK-UP.  In the meanwhile, Afghanistan is going to hell and getting ready to take Pakistan along for the ride; even Britain and Canada are going “Uh, George…this is not working, could you please get your ass back here to finish THIS job before we lose it?”

But George is moving to greener (read not-yet-bombed) pastures in Iran, he is sure he will be able to really wrap up the trouble if we just give him (or let him take) the green light.  So, it is completely possible that the western nations could see a huge swath of the “Mid-east” as we quaintly call it, embroiled in war.  And Turkey, a good friend in the area, is getting restive as Kurdish unrest grows on the border with Iraq, her troops are poised to strike.  The Moslem-majority nations involved believe America does all this at the beck and call of Israel, so an attack on Israel is not at all something unlikely.  Israel has the bomb.  So does Pakistan.  So, naturally, do we…and so does Russia.  Russia is not terribly sure she approves of our neo-imperialist behavior so  the good old “bear” may decide to get a piece of this action, too.

So, basically, Blaise, you imbecile?  ALL of these people (even the Russians again!) are being motivated by their belief in God.  Cause yes, lest anyone forget…Allah IS the same God of the Christian Bible and the Jewish Torah.  All these vast numbers of excitable and armed people took that wager and will ignite the world for it.  Is that what should properly be called nothing to lose??   Now, the Fundamentalists of both sides are ‘good’ with this…Islamic dead will have their virgins in  garden paradise, and Christians will see Christ return to open pits for such unbelievers as me….that IS the way the bloody story goes.  And the world can be laid to waste even without nuclear recourse—but that possibility gets higher with every additional nuke-holding nation joining the game.

Just examine this postulation, please: the wager is that nothing is lost save the doom of hell.  Here is my wager.  If there is no Omni-God out there, and no happy joy joy post apocalyptic heaven for the true believers, what is lost if you take that damned wager?  The world.  The world of six billion people is lost.  A planet already near its limit in human suffering is lost….and not instantly, but slowly by degrees if you aren’t the lucky ones at ground zero.  I hope Pascal is spinning in whatever grave they committed his body to all those years ago.  I don’t even bet on football games, and I sure as hell think it is time for my nation’ s leaders to stop betting on God and Second Comings.

I remember drama class in high school. I remember reading “Lord of the Flies” and acting appropriately dismayed on cue. But I kept hidden in my heart the one play we read that truly filled me with dismay: Henrik Ibsen’s “Dollhouse.” To think, now in the 21st century, most young women seem to think that word is nothing but a brand of shoes!

For those of you who have not read the play, it is about a young married woman who lives her life with her husband and two children. She does all the correctly pretty things, but lives in a dream of “something wonderful happening” because she is afraid, you see. Her father got into trouble and Nora pulled a dirty trick to get the money for him, she fears what will happen if her husband finds out….but hopes it will mean freedom from the fear and that he will suddenly see her not as a pretty doll, but a real woman. The dismay part? Well, he didn’t want anything but a doll, he told her she was an unfit mother and she surprised him (and possibly herself) by leaving him to find her own way. She got sick of the dollhouse existence.

Well, last night members of Congress had to stay up late listening to speeches while demonstrators tried not to provoke the police with dogs and klieglights. They were acting like citizens, portraying what America has been about for a good while now. You see, it is not enough to go to the polls and vote (tho’ not enough Americans do that!), because to this President, voters are just a specialized “focus group” that can be safely ignored. After all, with a Supreme Court in one’s pocket, one need not fear voters.

So, America is on the stage. Demonstrators screamed “IMPEACH!” at their senators last night. And more than half of us are waiting for something wonderful to happen, for some sign that this war can be stopped before enough young men and women die so that older vets of more protractedly bloody wars will have to stop saying things like “Well, WE lost more than that in a single battle!” We are waiting for the moment when someone saying “We can’t leave Iraq to the terrorists!” to be shouted down with the reality that if we were not there, and if we had not GONE there, the terrorists wouldn’t BE there either. We are waiting, hearts in our throats, for the cascading violence to stop before dominoes fall in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are waiting for recognition of the fact that America is creating terrorists and that the war will never end if it continues to be prosecuted in the fashion it has been thus far. Yes, we are waiting for something wonderful to happen. And unlike Nora, Ibsen’s doll who grew up and went away; we can’t just walk away….our current Administration has made us disliked enough, likely nobody wants us.   That only leaves growing up, doesn’t it?

As some of my readers know, I am pagan and do consider Athena my special patroness. I found this little hymn to her online, although I could not determine if it was a translation of an ancient work, or a new original song of praise and prayer. I did correct some oddities of the English, myself, as I like it enough to keep and use.

(Found online at: http://tinyurl.com/2kncsl )

Of Pallas Athene, guardian of the city, I begin to sing. Dread is she, for with Ares she loves deeds of war, the sack of cities and the shouting and the battle. It is she who saves the people as they go out to war and come back. Hail, goddess, and give us good fortune with happiness!

You are my shadow,
Who comforts me
With your heavenly presence.
Your melodious voice
Banishes my fear
Whenever I am in grave peril.

You are my light,
Who guides my wandering.
Your tracks never fail
To lead me home.
Your hands steer
My ship to safety
O’er stormy seas.

You are my strength
In time of trouble.
You answer my prayer
By strengthening my tired limbs
And my flagging courage.
Your steady hand
Guides my blows that
Put dismay in my enemies’ souls.

You are my wisdom,
Who brought me
To ecstasy and enlightenment.
Your flashing eyes
Pierced darkness and chaos
To reveal long-forgotten truth.

July 1, 2007, 11:33 am
Well, there it is right in the keywords, using the word that makes that ‘rating’ thing making the blog-round give me a PG-13: Dead

Imagine, the word ‘dead’…all by itself makes something unfit for children. Silly archaic minded me, I always figured childhoot was not some sweet fluff and fireworks world free of reality and ick, but the “growing into it” practice round for adolescence and adulthood. Apparently not.

Now that paragraph was ALL about distractions because whether or not my blog is rated PG-fucking-13 is NOT what I sat down to write about this morning. So prepare to watch my mind bounce around like a Mexican jumping bean. (What is that, you ask? You ARE a young one, aren’t you? WE of my ancient generation had them as toys….but they are of course banned or illegal now. It was a bean, an actual bean, with a little larvae of some presumably dangerous insect inside. When you held in the warm palm of your hand, it bounced about and was fair amusing to us in the days before routine television and video games)

Back on the track of the title, now. I have decided to take a cue from a book my husband my husband bought when he was told he was an “adult victim of ADD.” It suggested a more useful approach to adult ADD would be to see it as a positive thing…a sort of hyper-alert state suitable for hunters or warriors. Yeah, kinda airy-fairy too much video/LARP gaming there, eh? But the point is, distraction CAN actually lead to some interesting places, can be used to get where one is going just as certainly (if not as rapidly) as all that hard edged focus.

I have been pretty scatterbrained of late from the usual cause–sleep deprivation. I am thinking maybe I should just get used to that and accept that scatterbrained is going to be my constant mental state from here on out. So, in this condition I go out last evening to do my rounds on the Labyrinth.

Cup and list in hand, I stand on the first stone, beneath a cherry tree full of songbirds. They are eating the cherries, of course, but that is fine. You see, just as the cherries were ripening to perfection this year, we suddenly had a full inch of rain and knew we were ‘done’ vis a vis cherry picking. You see, a sudden influx of rain that near harvest makes the cherries burst open. Cherry juice drips on me like some peculiarly blood tinted blessing from above, the birds may as well eat well.

The week’s list making has been stressful. Every third news story was something like “Seven soldiers killed in street bombing” so I was expecting a lot of names on my nigh-daily DOD news release emails. But the tsunami of names didn’t materialize. I waited another day, still only a half dozen names out of my best estimate of two dozen killed. Finally, I cnecked another site for names and there…..oh, there, to my dismay were over THREE DOZEN names that the DOD apparently had not caught up with insofar as emailing them out. I listed them for my walk and posted them on the website forum in dismay; this site has very little beyond name, rank, and nationality. How does the random reader know that name familiar as a friend is M.B from Illinois, say, instead of THEIR M.B.? But a tension building in my own mind told me I needed to walk these names inward on the labyrinth and say farewell, so here I stood with both sides of the paper covered in names.

Fireworks go off in the distance; here in the US it is revving up for the 4th of July—for Independence Day fireworks and light shows. Or, at any rate, just a helluva good excuse for kids to make a lot of noise and fill the air with cordite. But, a bit unsteadily nerve-fried, standing there thinking of Iraq and Afghanistan, I jump in startlement with every little staccato ‘bang.’ A few days hence, it will be M-80s in trash cans at midnight, spooking the ducks and making the dog likely shit himself in the annual animal-baiting July hysteria. Suggesting a quieter, saner, less fire-danger mode of observing our independence is akin to telling certain sorts of rednecks they don’t need machine guns to hunt for venison.

I step off the stone, reading the names silently to myself as I sing. A bumble bee flies into my hair and is not happy, I shake my head to free her and continue on, struggling to recall where I was in the lyrical murder my inadequate voice is committing. Is this constant stop and go, I wonder as I dodge a stream of my own honeybees, inbound to the hive across the yard, any sort of faint echo of what it is like for our men and women at war? In the Army, more than three decades ago, I practiced hitting the ground for ‘incoming’ fresh hell of whatever nature it might be. Now, women like me do it in earnest somewhere across the planet. And one this month, named Trista, couldn’t be saved by that action and that is why her name is in my hand. A big, realllly big raven overflies me, scarcely a yard over my head—-single-mindedly intent upon the ripe cherries. And I think, at least on modern battlegrounds, they take the bodies away before the ravens and crows move in to pluck out the eyes. Now THERE is a distraction my tired, brittle mind could have done without.

I get to the center. I read the names, hail them, farewell them, offer the libation of beer. I watch it foam down the front of the monument, coating the 4200 counting beads, and jump again. Not fireworks this time, suddenly and most unexpectedly since I am right there…the fifteen ducks come quacking their way onto the stones. They veer onto the outermost ring, riffling through the wooly thyme in search of bugs and slugs. And there we are again, in the midst of noting death and giving death ‘his’ due….life springs out, buff-feathered, and making cheering little duck-murmurs of pleasure and delight. I return to my ritual observation and finish it off, the ducks flee as I turn towards them again.

Reality is a malleable thing, it appears. If this is ‘distraction’….well, Gods save me from focus! I stand off the stones under a tree of singing birds and watch the ducks amble through the tall clover. An engine is revving somewhere nearby, and a premature bottle rocket is barely visible in the too-light sky. My neck aches badly enough that I want to lie down on the stones round my firepit, a weariness permeates my entire body and I try to focus on grounding before I return to my kitchen to mundane tasks like dinner preparation.
But I cannot seem to reach all the scattered parts of myself that seem to have flown thousands of miles away faster than any SST could carry me; a whiff of cordite and a dose of distraction is transport beyond the dreams of engineers; and beyond the nightmares of families and spouses.

Ok, here we go again. A place to kwetch, emote, agonize, and otherwise batter the English language. More to come in days ahead. Summer is here, and getting hotter. I will be going somewhere hotter still all too soon….and not just according to the Baptists

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