Archive for March, 2008

The third Monday now from the day when I was fever-felled. I am very slowly regaining my strength after a week of dangerously high fever and no food to speak of to sustain me. Today was my first solo dogwalk with Jayne the giant hairball slobber king Pyrenees. I didn’t go the full route…perhaps a half mile total. But it was sunny, in spite of night-time lows in the 20’s and there finally were swallows on the power lines! In spite of snow spitting spitefully at our windows all last week as I lay still a-bed, perhaps spring is here?

I read a lot while I was recovering, though not so much the first week when my eyes burned along with the rest of me. My lengthy recovery reminds me with force that I am no longer young and my body will demand more gentleness from me now. However, the rest of my world is nagging—the house needs a good cleaning, the garden has been in arrears now for three weeks. It will stay a bit in arrears, I fear, until walking the dog doesn’t leave me ready for my bed again.

I thought about my aging process as I lay helplessly ill. I thought of over 4000 young men and women who will not age, nor lie in a soft bed with family at hand. I thought about the perhaps 29,000 wounded, some of whom do still lie a-bed, wondering, no doubt, how to reclaim their lives. I thought about the military adventurism sapping the military of life and vigor while enriching contractors and others who profiteer in concert with the specter sucking America dry for a contract of lies. My nation seems as ill and prostrate as I still feel, and there is no doctor with a vial of truth, it seems, to effect a cure.

And my reading material has included a book by Jared Diamond about how societies “collapse” or fail. Part of that discussion was the ancient Anasazi civilization in the very area we considered retiring to in our older old age! It is a precarious place, and its continuance even now depends on strong government to control water supply and distribution. I don’t know if I would have the wherewithal to build a place there that would make me feel sufficiently secure in case of political upheaval rocking America’s boat!Do I, I asked myself, staring at the ceiling and taking pills, really believe my country is on that bare edge of popular insurrection, ecological disaster, or national bankruptcy? I am not finished with “Collapse” yet, but I’ve read enough that I am more uncertain than usual if I want to be in a more fragile environment! Even here, survival in the face of any of those three things would be difficult—in the desert Southwest, it might be impossible. And imagine, I have not really got to the sections of the book (if such exist) where a horrendously ruinous WAR helped a nation fall.

I tell myself it is illness making my view so bleak, weakness sapping my normally “can do” attitude. And I tell myself to go eat, drink something warm, and drive on.

One of my favorite books in this world of glorious books is Dostoyevski’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” My favorite character is the rebel Ivan, the brother who ably lists the cruelties of his world to lay at the feet of God, and announces that if bowing his head in acceptance of these horrors as “the way it must be” is what earns him his ticket to heaven, well, then God can have his exalted ticket BACK. I have thought, ever since reading the book for the first time, in my teens, that more than the ticket to heaven might need to be so aptly “punched.”

Some of the reading I did while I was laid up with fever brought this back to my mind. Because you see, my first “religion” had jack to do with Abrahamic gods; my first religion was feminism. My major first feminist act was carrying a petition about in the summer before my senior year of high school—to get the school board to allow the girls to stop shivering through fuel crisis winters in a tiny Kansas town in our skirts; I wanted the “right” to be warm in slacks. And I got it. And I paid dearly. The hither-to handful of scholarships the counselor had been holding out to me dried up like a popcorn fart. But I was a good little soldier, and soon more literally than usual—I joined the Army when women were still sent to the WACS, and was on the lines of many “firsts” for women. I was among the first to ask for and get weapons training, I was among the first to do more than secretarial or nursing work. I was hard core.

While I was ill, once the fever abated enough I could open my eyes, I read “It’s a Jungle Out There” by Amanda Marcotte. I began to anticipate a joyous book review to be written when I felt better. It is a very amusing book, Ms. Marcotte is endowed with a terrific sense of humor. Perhaps I am less so? Because I ran into a brick wall in the midst of the book, and perhaps it had been niggling away at my mind from the start when Ms. Marcotte asked why more young women do not willingly self-identify as feminists. Why indeed? I can’t answer for young women—I’m an older every day woman who woke up for too many mornings in a row getting a major “squick” over the title “feminist” after wearing it like a banner for the first 2/3 of my life!

The first part of the “squick” was that suddenly there was this conversation happening about EVERYthing. You couldn’t read a book, a novel, for crying out loud, without having SOMEone discuss whether it met feminist criteria of some sort. This squicked me as an old time cold warrior who got more than her share of studying Communist ideology being stuffed down throats—-every personal act being analyzed to see if it aided the “revolution.” So, what “women’s liberation” had become an ideology? An “ism” more than something about the mere feminine? Seeing adult women refuse to consider a book I had loved because “Well, I just don’t know how her work plays into feminism.” made me get a bit crazy. What, as feminists we get to turn off our brain till some big feminist puts a good-girl-imprimatur upon the titles, kind of like the Catholic Church used to do? What happened to liberation? What happened to thinking for oneself and TRUSTING oneself to make the right decisions?

But that was just a bit of walnut in the rocky road, that one. The one that got me big time, and the wall I hit in the book, was about men. Maybe a subclass of men? Divorced men…..with child support to pay. One little paragraph of the book basically dismisses “men’s rights organizations” as being about nothing more than divorced men wanting out of paying child support. Scuzzballs! Uh, right. This hit me badly on a couple levels.

First off, in the absence of any knowledge of individuals involved, it sounds terribly like the very sorts of things men once used to dismiss feminists—the same sort of slanderous nastiness that Ms. Marcotte lists and deconstructs and bullshit and straw men of the rankest sort in her most excellent book. So how can she fall into the same sort of error? Because when you look at some individual men who at least investigated men’s rights groups (and walked away disappointed), you realize it is NOT always about “just not paying child support.” Let me give you two examples.

The first is a man I have known for about fifteen years. His daughters were given into his custody when the mother abandoned them. For a decade he gave it his all, raising the toddler and watching the older two head into their teens. His ex dragged him into court frequently, accusing him of all sorts of things, and once attacking him physically IN court. She didn’t go to jail, although I am certain had he leapt across the aisle to kick and pummel her a jail cell would have held him that night. When his youngest child was eleven, the mother kidnapped the girls. When he called the cops, they told him they couldn’t be bothered with “custody issues.” When he finally got a court date to deal with this “custody issue” the ex had her lawyer ask for “joint custody” because apparently, having them suddenly gave her rights. And she got it, and my friend was ordered to pay child support for the time SHE had the children. Now mind you, in the more than ten years he raised his girls, she had been ordered to pay child support, and was to pay him under the new arrangement when the girls were with him. She never paid one dime. She was not jailed, her car was not taken, her license was not revoked—she was in no way inconvenienced for flaunting the order of the court. And now, her kidnapping was rewarded with custody? Everyone would be up at arms if the gender roles were reversed here—if the male parent had not paid, if the male parent kidnapped and demanded his custody be made legal. But no, not a serious peep. Justice is dead when it comes to the rights of males vis a vis divorce and custody. Was this woman a good mother, was my friend a bad father? Now, see, if I asked that question about a woman alone….I’d be told I was being a sexist. I won’t bore you with the list of completely nutjob, not to mention criminal acts committed by this “good” mother.

Second case is considerably closer to home, being in the family—my son’ s family. His ex is one of a large number of young Army bride’s who simply decided, during this war, that “marriage shouldn’t be this hard, it should be fun and I am not having fun,” who ran home to mama and filed for divorce. She kind of showed her hand, in her initial outting, she didn’t even ask for child support—-she asked for alimony after less than three years of marriage. Although my son has no college to speak of, she has been attending college for most the ten years since she left high school, but has no degree as she changes majors like most folks change shoes. My son, disabled and medically discharged out of the military got a good job, tho’ on the opposite coast from his beloved child and he OFFERED her a very good child support payment in the divorce. An exorbitant amount for a single child—the child he cared about passionately.

But after a year, he got told his daughter (under age three) had FIVE cavities and would need anesthesia to fix them. He confronted the mother; they had argued bitterly over her never cooking meals and feeding the child sweets all day, the mother said it wasn’t her fault—the cavities were cause the child cried over tooth-brushings so much that she hadn’t been brushing her teeth. Well, its a toddler, for crying out loud, whose damned fault IS it if not the mother’s? The bill was over $5000. Did the mother get asked if she was being neglectful? No, she did not. The distant father was told to pay….for something utterly out of his control.

He left his good job, came back across the country, took a job making about twenty thousand LESS per year, all to see his child. He was only able to pay the high child support because he lived with us. Then he injured his already fragile knees and was on disability for a full year after more surgery. He could not return to the job, and eventually his child support fell into arrears. He was told he could not apply for a reduction in the amount in spite of his change of circumstances until October of 2008. Then they told him they would take his car—but you see, WE already had done that, buying it from him as he could not make  car payments AND child support on the disability pay’s paltry sum. So now they say they will take his driver’s license…..and bar him getting one in ANY state. Gee, so if he finds a job that does not further wreck his body, he can’t get to it? In this state, if you don’t drive, you don’t work and nobody will hire you. And in today’s war ravaged economy, jobs are few and far between for able-bodied drivers.

So, a disabled veteran father who is unemployed is criminalized—yes, they threaten “criminal charges” as well, you see. Being poor and female is a disgrace and a shame; being poor and male is a crime. It isn’t about not paying child support, my son job searches every day, for something he can physically sustain; he would be on the streets if we could not maintain our home for him. He has not seen his child in over a year in spite of the visitation schedule.

You see, her visits were weekends of screaming and refusing to eat—even foods long-time favorites. The child sat in bed carrying on long imaginary conversations with the mother—imagine my son listening to this, his child saying “I’ll miss you mommy, I don’t want to go to see daddy.”….and in a play-acted mommy voice, “I know, sweetie, but you have to, I hate it, too and I still love you even if you do go see daddy.” Gee, parental interference much? But calling Child Protective Services seemed helpful, they took his info and said yes, this (and worse stuff) was ‘red flag’ behavior, this child needed to be evaluated at ONCE. And then, the screeching halt—what, he was NOT the custodial parent? Well, cancel ALL of it then, only the mother can make that necessary appointment. So, suddenly the red flags faded to pussified pink and it was all for naught. He decided the only way to spare his child the trauma was to not see the child unless it was supervised visits so someone ELSE could see this behavior—but the state will not do supervised visits unless it is ordered by a mediator. A mediation period costs $700 or so, apparently. Did I mention the inherent broke-ness of being here?

But money isn’t enough if you are the male in a divorce, even one who has tried to do the “right” thing all the way. Are divorced mothers who ’stay at home’ (even with a decade of college under one’s belt) the “new Spartans” and the ex-husbands are their Helot-slaves? Or have we merely returned to Colonial America’s indentured servitude? And feminists are to be good and onboard with this? Is this the version to males that Ms. Marcotte says is given to women when birth results from sex: “It’s what you get, sex is yucky.”

There is no shortage of asshole ex-males out there, but the newsflash is, there is no shortage of snide, laughing, system-abusing females either—my ex daughter-in-law had a part time job, you see. She shined boots at the base exchange, to be told dozens of times a day how pretty she was, and she partied at night with other military wives who told her how easy it is to “take these military suckers” for everything. They gave her chapter and verse on how to get his pay, and if she was lucky, retirement pay, too. Some feminists. I think the word used to be gold-digger!

Even more than being told what to read, what to watch, and what to listen to in music to keep myself properly feministly inspired, I can’t take seeing what was offensive when it happened to women being done to men without question. That isn’t justice, that is payback. That isn’t liberation, it is revenge. Knowing how many veterans come back from this war, having gotten those dreaded “Dear John” letters, facing divorce on top of gods know what other personal hells….it makes my mind stumble.

So, after thrashing the bed-covers for days as fever vanished and body strength returned, I fear this is another ticket I will give back. I will be a humanist, thank you. I want human rights, human liberation. For all. ALL!

I have been very ill for the last week, high fevers kept me to my bed.  Slowly recovering, re-gaining strength and all, will and imagination are lagging somewhat.  So, I give you a guest-blog by my son.  He was motivated to this particular little rant by a recent pair of news stories about KBR and supplying troops in Iraq.  The non-potable water they are in charge of, for instance, has been found so disgustingly polluted that even showering in it has given skin ailments and eye infections and possibly been to to blame  for at least one death.  So, why was the water SO bad?  Because the contractors had been too goddamned lazy to even UNPACK, much less use the water filtration equipment that they had been been paid to operate.  Perhaps they had better things to do that day—like drug and rape a co-worker and then lock her in a cargo container while they decided how to shut her up?

As if poisoning people in their showers with nasty water isn’t enough, now it appears at least a dozen service members, including a young man named Ryan Maseth, have been electrocuted because of electronic gadgets in said shower complexes. (http://tinyurl.com/38k8cs) Apparently, the responsible contractor couldn’t be bothered to remove or even check the electronic devices after the first electrocution.

Contractors are a growing cancer upon the military body.  The control the lives of military families, since “maintenance” of quarters is entirely out of military hands now and in the hands of civilians who act much like slum lords on every military post in the nation.  The Jester offers a brief rant, but I beg you all to consider writing to your Congressional critters—tell them the military services is capable of their own supply and maintenance.  Bring back the Quartermaster Corps….tell the bloodsuckers draining the Pentagon pockets and doing a lousy job for the money to peddle their inferior wares elseware.  The Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines deserve better than Walmart on steroids.

THE PROBLEM WITH CONTRACTORS (Pickled Jester)

Since the inception of our nation, prior even to the birth of this nation, our military has used civilian contractors. For the most part the use of independent, profit driven civilian companies to supply the essential needs of an army has been both fruitless and expensive. That dismally depressing tradition has continued for over two centuries now, with the same success rate. Even more depressing is the fact that the use of contractors by our government has increased in recent years, with disastrous effect.
When I first joined the service in April of 1997 I was in the logistics field with the Air Force. During my four years in the Air Force I saw the very beginnings of a drastic and quite unnecessary change. My chosen (not preferred mind you) career field was slowly being phased out; the absolutely indispensable services provided now were to be awarded to civilians. The logistics world wasn’t the only one affected by this change, certain aspects of military recreation were also being gutted and handed over to civilian companies.
I argued against this change from the very beginning. At least what I saw as the beginning, I’m fairly certain that the arrangement had been years in progress by the time I was privy to such information. Regardless, I argued against it to absolutely no effect what so ever. I found that the military, whichever branch you like, doesn’t listen to the people on the ground, especially when it came to nationally awarded contracts.
The effects of this transfer were relatively minor at first, serving as little more than a small inconvenience to all of us military types. We soon found that the section responsible for the issuance of personal gear was no longer in the hands of our fellow airmen. All that really meant was that no more freebies were to be forthcoming. (Beware–honesty here, did you think the Pickled One would LIE about a time-honored military tradition?) Some of you out there may think of that as a good thing being that the military could now more easily keep track of equipment and would be able to save the tax payers a little money. Perhaps so, but one of the very old benefits of military service was (and sometimes still is) the theory of ‘you scratch my back’. In other words people were willing to help people out in exchange for services offered and so forth. With the Personal Equipment section now in civilian hands we were all a little more screwed in a secluded world that already had more than its fair share of screwjobs for those of who lived there 24 hours a day. Not too mention the fact that no money was saved to our nation; the civilians simply got all the free shit that military members once were gifted. And I must tell you, those overpriced pricks did not deserve that particular benefit. Additionally, a great deal more money was spent employing a handful of civilian employees. Civilian contractors get a salary far and above what members of the military receive. Think about that the next time you are deciding who to vote for.
Now with two wars occurring in relatively the same section of the world our nation, for the first time in our history, has more civilians in a war zone than we do military members. I might be wrong, but I find issue with that. Your average military member at the pay grade of E-4 makes roughly forty thousand a year; that amount is increased when the service member is deployed to a war zone. Your average contractor on the other hand is given a minimum salary of one hundred thousand. So, your lowest paid military contractor serving in theatre makes more than double what a soldier makes. Anyone else see a problem here?
Now, as if the salary alone weren’t enough to make you stomach turn, consider the following:
1. As far back as 1783 our government saw the pitfalls of contractors; poor quality, poor service, and the innate desire of contractors to look after their profit margin first and foremost.
2. Contractors in theatre are not bound by any contract. In other words they can pack up and leave whenever the hell they want too. Every one of military members serving in theatre is held subject to long deployments and don’t go home until the military lets them. A civilian on the other hand can leave when ever and for whatever reason they like, with no penalties of any sort.
3. Our contractors in theatre at the moment are immune to any law, including our own law.
4. Contractor services are at best, poor quality. At worst they are responsible for injury and or death or U.S. military personnel and Iraqi’s, or Afghani’s as the case may be. And they are not held responsible for these damages.
So, four rather disturbing reasons argue against the use of contractors for almost any purpose. Yet our government forces them upon our military, as it has done for over two hundred years. And worse, they show no signs of ceasing this expensive habit in the foreseeable future.
The point of this little diatribe is thus: contractors’ providing services to our military is not a new thing. In some cases the use of a contractor can be of benefit to the military and to local economies. But most of the time contractors are nothing more than a blight to both military and our nation. The reason for the continued use of such a morally misguided, profit driven system is rooted in money gifted to politicians. Defense contractors donate massive sums of money to our politicians each and every year, to both the Democratic and Republican parties. These contributions keep these pathetically inept and thoroughly corrupt politicians in power so that they may ensure beyond doubt, that corporations may become successful war profiteers.

No, I do not mean my husband has turned 50, bought a sports car and taken up redheads as a hobby. Nor have I taken to hiring Chippendale Dancers for my own birthday parties, or proclaiming “I’m SO hot!” every five minutes at parties while dressing in things appropriate only to curvy 22 year olds.

No, I am looking at the world news and wondering what century I have fallen into while I dozed in the arms of Morpheus. Suddenly, there are no modern solutions to many of the world’s issues, it seems.

Crime is not to be tackled by eliminating the causes—drug addiction, poverty, and desperation—no, religion is the cure. If we all would just get Biblical enough, we would KNOW better. Really? Redefining it all as sin is the best fix of the 21st century? And, apropos to nothing but more lunacy, did you know that “fresh air” in the sunshine is superior to “shady” fresh air—being more blessed by the Lord? (Yes, I am going to breath deeply in the shade—there must be some unidentified hallucinogen in that sunshine!)

And people are not falling away from Christian churches for ordinary reasons like, oh, I don’t know—not getting spiritual needs or any other needs filled, or fearing clerical abuses like pedophilia; but because neo-paganism is making unhealthy inroads to the Christian life. Catholic newspapers are making the case for exorcisms of pagans, because it is a sort of spiritually affective mental illness. Wow, I had no idea that my own speculative and skeptical examination of Hellenic or Nordic paganism was destroying Western Civilization! I am pagan, hear me roar!! And Protestant sorts are claiming there is a crying need to purge their religious habits of pagan habits and ideals as well. Honestly, this is all you have got? Your former adherents of monotheistic religion are wandering in a dark night of the soul into strange mental districts and it is because paganism is simultaneously a mental illness AND a form of possession? Have any of you religious leaders so proclaiming actually even taken a Psych 101 course?

And if neo-paganism isn’t a big enough boogie-man, there are calls from disparate enough locales as Oklahoma and Scotland to beware of the “gay conspiracy” that is sneaking up from the rear. Yes, that evil horrid ’soap in the shower’ pun was intentional. Good gravy! To Ms. Kerns who is sure Project Headstart is only to provide the gay conspiracy inroads to “indoctrinating” our children early, and to the Archbishop in Scotland who thinks gays want to destroy Christianity, let me assure you—all that has jack to do with homosexuality. We want Project Headstart and often fall into some anti-Christian rhetoric because we are violently ANTI-STUPID. In other words, folks, Catholic Churches are not bleeding members because of a gay conspiracy, but because parents fear pedophile priests and the Church that covers their pedophile asses. And as for Oklahoma’s Kerns and her tirade? Well, Ms. Dippy, I don’t know how to point out to you how wrong your message was other than to say use the word “Jew” everywhere you said “gay” and see what kind of shit hits your fan. Because that is about where you are….hunting for a new scapegoat to hang your political bent upon.

The title refers to history and not to red cars, redhats, or suitably vapid redheads. I apparently slipped on dropped soap in the shower and kept sliding all the way back into the 11th century or so. And not a gay soap-dropper in sight. I took a weekend sabbatical to switch computers—but holy shit, who switched calendars on me? Wasn’t this century supposed to be about flying cars and Buck Rogers? And why can’t I round up a crew of Stupids and tie them to theater seats to deliver a forced course of Star Trek or something? Cause, damn, Sam….superstition is what we pagan sorts get accused of, but some of the crap on the news tells me someone else is holding the patent! Scotty can beam me up anytime; this planet sucks like a Hoover on steroids some times.  Or, let’s page the Fifth Dimension….cause, dudes, where in hell did my “Age of Aquarius ” disappear to while I was waiting?

Just a short one, doing an office re-org here, shifting computers and so forth.  I will be leaving the expensive and over-powered world of MacIntosh for an aged PC.

I really am a kindergardener in the world of computerese, so the new family business Mac that my husband bought is like buying  the never-drives-over-75-mph me a Ferrari; therefore the brand new IMac is going to the son’s desk.  But all this shift and switch will take hours/days of spaghetti untangling and dusting, cleaning, swearing.  See you all back by Monday or Tuesday latest.

Ok, first a tiny bit of confession—every time the GOP has had a sex scandal I have made sarcastic and caustic comments. Big woof, I am a Democrat. But did I follow each story, scream and yell for which ever idiot de jour it was to be publicly castrated? No, in spite of hearing of a couple cases involving children that made me WANT to do so. Did I make insulting comments about their wives? No, I did not.

But I am feeling a bit maxed on nerves this morning for purely personal reasons, so I am going to wade into this hoopla about the Governor (ok, ex-governor) of New York. Why is it our business? Do all those journalists get that seriously panty-bunched over EVERY “john” who hires a hooker? And make no mistake—-$50 or $5000, its a hooker, get the hell over it.

Now, I am apparently a very unnatural woman. I believe prostitution should be legal. It is going to exist, it is my idea of a victimless “crime” if you insist on calling it criminal. I think legal prostitution is more easily regulated and kept both clean and UNcriminal. But obviously, the many Puritanical ideas about sexuality that still hold sway in America make that quite unlikely to occur. So when someone like Eliot Spitzer gets caught with a hand in the cookie jar, Oh My Gawds…..do you all see my eyes rolling here?

And all the lacrimose on-carryings about his wife and how she could stand by him—-some “journalists”(AH….yes, the LEGAL whores!) going so far as to say it was for purely ambitious political reasons of HER own. You know, that is just SO very classy, folks. Dwell on the poor wife. Cause you know, everyday women never have to deal with what she has on her unhappy plate, right?  And most of what is on her plate, because of “journalists” isn’t because of her husband at all. Here is a big clue for you camera-jockeying harlots: the fidelity or lack of it between a man and woman is THEIR business, not YOURS.

I have been a military wife for 30 years. I was military first. I was disliked by other wives, because I seem to have had an invisible scarlet letter on my forehead that meant “She is a WAC, one of those whores that is at work with HIM.” Now, I didn’t sleep with married men while single, and I never slept with ANYone  except my own husband after my marriage. This is not because physical fidelity is a big deal to me. It is NOT. I think it is the most shallow view of marriage one can possibly hold. I think it is as silly as swearing to never eat outside one’s own kitchen, even if starving. I have been physically faithful because it is important to my husband….but if he needed a piece of ass when I was not around, you know, I just don’t see that as the first sign of the marital apocalypse. See, obviously unnatural, me, in a field of women prone to making comments like “If he comes back from this exercise and I think he has been dipping his goddamned wick, I am gonna leave and take his damned retirement pay with me!” I also knew Army wives who ran around. Who wrote “Dear John” letters. But gee, if the guy does it, well, back to the “Oh my gawd” chorus we must surely go.

Get the hell OVER it America. It is their business. Oh, and you GOP MFs? You can kiss my unnatural ass—you of the multiple divorces, you who didn’t hound Vetter to bits, or Craig, you who do classy shit like serve divorce papers on cancer-fighting wifes, you who like Rudy of New York. What a bunch of silly tight-assed hypocrites! Personally, I don’t think Eliot was getting laid by a high priced call girl for sexual reasons at all. I think it was a power game, mostly—-not too different from the guy in the hotel bar who orders the Scotch that costs $78 bucks a shot. And his wife looked very unhappy, shame on journalists who make CERTAIN it gets worse because of lots of play. Kudos to Spitzer for quitting to give those vampiric assholes less cause to continue dogging their every move.

But honestly, America, this is the BIG deal? This matters? We have an economy trying to do a 1929 retro hell, we have a war on two fronts, we have civil rights being violated right and left (btw..that is how they nabbed Spitzer–watching his bank transactions as if he wre a member of the Cosa Nostra), we have a President who wants to go for number three in Iran in the next nine months and THIS is what you are getting your shorts up the crack about? A dozen US soldiers have died in the last week, tell me, do you know even ONE of their names off the top of your head? Why don’t you ask those journalistic watchdogs why THEY don’t get any goddamned play in the spotlight? Because if THIS kind of shit is what you all get your news hour rocks off about, well, then maybe we don’t bloody deserve anything better than what is happening to us.

My cup of disgust runneth over.

Spring clean up time, the stones are washed and repaired from tippage of moles and frost. Washing them off to the sparkly freshness on a warming spring day made me think about the duck prints between the stones. Is it right that my ducks (who gift me daily now with very good eggs) walk on the memorial day after day? Should I try finding funds to fence the entire circle of the Labyrinth?

What do the ducks mean to me? They give me eggs, a wonderfully domestic and nurturing sensation—a fresh egg for breakfast. And waddle-footing it round the back yard, eating slugs and bugs and quacking, they are very entertaining. As we worked there on Sunday, removing grass from an area, tilling it and planting a no-mowing-needed lawn substitute, they were companionable. They would run up, close as three feet to investigate the newly turned soil as I moved rocks away. Their soft little ducky murmurs made me feel warm and relaxed in spite of an aching back. What do the ducks mean to me? They mean a home, peace, plenty, serenity.

So, what does the Labyrinth mean to me? It means honoring the dead of the current wars. It means missing the fallen and grieving for their families whose homes have suffered a shattering loss. It means wishing Iraq could again have peace, and plenty and serene homes—-all the things the ducks symbolize and embody for me.

So, yes, suddenly I am alright with the ducks patrolling the Walk of the Fallen. Maybe by some sympathetic magic, the things they give to me will filter into the stones I walk with names of the dead (at least eight more this week alone). When that energy swirls as I do so, and I pour my libations at the central stone, perhaps something besides my grief and anger will be directed, maybe some of that ducky peace and feathery comfort will go with my words?

In the news, hardly a day goes by when you can’t find a heartrending tale of abuse and its sad result.  Even when the child/woman/man survives there are terrible tolls to be paid down that dread highway of recovery and reclamation.  Almost nobody really argues with what the headshrinkers tell us about the connections between being horribly abused in some manner and then, if not treated and helped, becoming an abuser.  Pedophiles, for instance, have been found to have been the victim of pedophiles.  Abused children sometimes grow up to abuse their own kids—-it unfortunately was their model of parental behavior; and without outside help they have no other model.  Sure, there are happy exceptions to the rule—but there are too many cases that certainly are neither happy nor an exception.

So, why does it seem we don’t hear anything about this microcosmic model  as it reflects on the large scale?  The national scale, for instance.  I grew up, for instance, in an age that held the nation of Israel up as a heroic ideal.  They were making a home in a desert, greening the sands of Palestine/Israel—”making the desert bloom” is the phrase, if I recall rightly.  Survivors of the Holocaust, escapees from behind Russia’s pogram-prone Iron Curtain, all survivors and valiant nation builders, oh, that was the image even without Paul Newman doing “Exodus.”

Uhuh.  Look again, Paul.  I don’t think he would re-do that film now, even to be that young, blond and devastating again.  Israel acts more like the oppressors her citizens once ran from ,now, and America sends cash and weaponry to aid her.  I see more and more condemnation and I have to say, it goes down hard, it sticks in my throat badly like a bent fishbone.  I can’t do the kneejerk thing and wish Israel made a parking lot, or see her people cut off from all aid and succor; I don’t believe they are all bad.

But I do believe many of the older core of leaders are badly scarred, I believe that the horrors of their youth and the stories told them by their parents have damaged their perception and reaction to life.  The abused have become the abusers.  And so, what has this to do with a blog that should at least tenuously be tied to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the connection to the dead there?

Well, look then not at Israel, but at America.  We won World War II.  The Greatest Generation came home, went to college, moved to the suburbs and got on with life.  And spawned the Cold War.  We wrapped ourselves in a cocoon of paranoia and fear and bristled with nukes until the Soviet Union broke her bank.  This war is breaking OUR bank, regardless what the Shrubberies are saying about it being because the economy cannot adjust to the building of “too many houses”…..let me say this slowly in simple words.  IT IS THE WAR, STUPID!

And the war is not only chewing up the economy.  It is chewing up the men and women engaged in fighting it….they are the microcosmic bits being gnashed in the teeth of war.  The ones who come home, back to America’s macrocosm to meld back into the consumerist Borgdom that we have been told we are supposed to be will not be the same people who left.  I am not painting the stupid bad movie genre image of the nutcake Viet Nam vet who was the bad guy on bad tv cop shows for decades after that sad mess of death and wounding, either.  I’m not that stupid or shallow; and neither, dear readers, are you.

But it would be disingenuous in  the extreme to claim that we are not shaped by experience.  If the experience is traumatic and horrible, so is the shaping.  Look at the anger of John McCain and ask what shaped it, for example.  Israel does what she does because key elements of her government have the pain carved phrase “Never again!” in their very brain pans.  America did what she did and Russia did what she did in the Cold War because of the acidic etchings of fear.  Ideology drives nations, but ideology is not a pure thing out of an idealistic book—whether the book is by Karl Marx or Thomas Paine, folks—-it has a hidden chapter written by experience of personal nightmare and interpreted through a filter of dread and hatred.

Ask yourselves what is being written in the brains of young Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Ask yourselves what permutations of nightmare and misery will come out the other side.  Ask yourselves what America will look like in ten years, in twenty, in fifty if all that plays out unchecked, unaddressed, unacknowledged.  Ask yourselves how many more men and women, officers and enlisted, we can afford to warp, spindle, and mentally and physically mutilate.   And then pretend all is well when they come home and are told to relax and go shopping as if that fixes it all?

Again, in simple words.  WHAT INJURES THE ONE, DAMAGES THE WHOLE.   We are letting thousands be injured, and if we don’t help them to heal better than is being done presently, perhaps we deserve what happens to the whole.  Look closely at Israel, people.  Look what happens when a nation responds to every threat as if it really IS the boogieman in the memory’s closet.

We supposedly got into this to take out a “tyrant” in Sadamn  Hussein and his corrupt family-tribal-tied government; do you want America to look like THAT in a few years?  Our current administration pursues a “war on terror” by CONSTANTLY invoking the boogyman of terrorism.  I have this feeling if we keep “calling” that boogyman, we may get what we are begging for, to our grief.  And it won’t necessarily be a foreign boogyman, either.

Find the brake pedal, ok?  Put that pedal to the medal, please…and fast.

Spring is upon us in the great Nor’west.  This means it was time to go see what winter had wrought upon the stones of the Labyrinth, as if my frequent walks there had not kept me well apprised of the situation.  But Tuesday, out I went to the memorial that is both the symbol of and a contributing cause of my constant grief over the continuing war.

Usually, even this early, weeding is a big necessity and takes about nine or ten hours of knee wrecking concentration.  Not this year.  This year, we have six full grown ducks on patrol and they have eaten almost every scrap of green, including many of the desired plants out there.  But, no weeds….I can cope with the loss of the liatris, perhaps?

But other tasks are there in spite of he ducks…leveling a few mole sunk stones or a couple frost heaved sections.  This is negligible this year—my big rebuild last spring apparently held pretty well.  But the ducks have scattered fine gravel and big fist sized rocks from the borders all across the walk with their scampering flat feet.  This takes me a couple hours to fix.  I have to drag beams to the under eave area of my son’s adjoining building and dig them in so there is a containment for the large stones that are the drainage zone for roof rain runoff.  Then I have to get a small rake and bucket to collect all the scattered stones and put them back where they belong.  I edge the Walk with old broken sandstone chunks to keep the smaller gravel and stones from the firepit area from being duck-raked back onto the paving stones.

And all the while I work, the trees in the adjacent lot are full of crows.  The outliers even perch in my fir trees carrying on quite the corvine conversation about what I am doing.  I enjoy the crows; their loud convivial communities endlessly amuse and comfort me.  Their constant wars with the hawks  pose all sort of silly metaphorical questions for me.  But on Tuesday morning, those mobile bits of black murmur and squawk made me feel envious in a way.

It is hard for me to not compare crows to people.  They are acquisitive birds, they take anything sparkly that they can carry away.  They can be gluttonous.  They have a healthy sense of “My road kill, jerkwad….drive around me,” but know just when to move when the jerkwad of the hour is not going to drive around.  I love them best, however, not as the solitary trash-picker, but in full “murder” formation as they were on Tuesday.  I think this is because I am more often lonely than not and crows never seem lonesome, even when alone.  While I appreciate solitary time, I differentiate between that and lonely time.  And time working on the Walk is always solitary and often lonely.  I no longer freeze when working there, as I once did.  But others do, would be helpers begin to shiver even working in summer; some have even gone a bit blue about the lips there.  So, the crows are my only company there.

Being pagan, having spent more time than the average American looking at various legends, I am also aware of the mythic reputation of crows and ravens.  They have strong associations with Nordic and Celtic legends, being associated with entities as powerful as Odin and Morrighan.  Many friends have noted that crows and ravens are very fond of my yard and the Labyrinth area and they find significance in this.  It is harder for me to nail down what, if anything, all the crows mean.  I feel comforted by the raucous hordes, but do I feel a “presence”?  No.

That is the sorrow of this Walk of the Fallen as the war goes on and on, you see, I feel less and less.  My emotions are going through as certain a process as any Kubler-Ross book on dying ever listed.  First, I was so furious when I went out there with a list of names that I almost vibrated.  Then, more often, I was so stricken with grief and despair that I had to take myself in a very firm hand not to weep as I walked. Of course, I did come to the accommodation that it is what it is and I have to be what is required; and after that physical tiredness set in more than the emotional drain.  And now, as the anniversary of the war’s beginning comes round again, I feel empty and hollow.  I often think of the common phrase for an empty alcohol bottle, “dead soldier”, when I am out there.  I once wished I could collect enough empty tiny booze bottles to display one bottle of each literal dead soldier, just to make the damned point to sleeping America.  As this war goes on, I feel as if I am one of those empty bottles…..all poured out.

Sometimes it takes me four days after I compose a list to actually force myself out upon the Walk—true, part of that was winter and ice and early darkness at work; but more of it was just a reluctance that escapes my ability to describe accurately.  A desire to say “It is over….it will stop now” became a cell deep need.  Every name received was a slap that told me again that it was not ended.  This longing became so intense that I actually formulated a “finalization” for the labyrinth.

I decided that when the bulk of the troops do come home, although I know we will likely maintain a presence there for possibly decades to come, I will change the Walk.  Although I feel convinced that on some level of existence, that seven circuit walkway will always exist, I have a growing need to soften it.  I want to make it a closed ring at the outer and largest circuit and remove the inner circuits completely.  Then, with those stones, I will make either four or six “rays” from the central stone to that outer ring.  And I will plant herbs, flowers, sweet smelling things in the triangles of earth.  It will be a  healing “medicine circle” over the site of the walkway of grief and mourning.

But that is still at some unknown  future point.  And I am still in the company of crows, I feel like draping myself in a like shade of black.  I believe in reincarnation.  Not necessarily in the Eastern sense of karma and debt, but more in a “Oh, crap….look at that life! I can do better…gimmee a new one!” sense.

But I don’t know if I can do better, or if I even want to, at least not as a human.  I think I might prefer to really be in the company of crows  or ravens next time around the planet.  Perhaps, as my ashes will one day be scattered over the site of the Labyrinth, my new physical self will perch in the tall firs on its edge.  Birds don’t cry and have no tears; but they don’t need to grasp for the right word to describe their feelings either.  If I am being rendered inarticulate and dark…..lets just go for it back to an original source.  If I am hollowed out to memory alone, maybe being a raven like one on Odin’s shoulder wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Trying to get back into some sort of regular writing habit again….let me know how I am doing, lol!

I have been listening to a while now about how “good” the economy is/how bad the economy is and it seems to me that the goodness or badness is relative to your place in the economy. America used to talk less about economic classes than Europe, at least that was my general observation living both places off and on. And I wonder if that time of relative quiet on the subject is over?

What makes me launch into this today is the continual effort by my son, medically discharged from the Army with two pretty totaled knees, to find a job that will support him and pay his child support payment again before the State of Washington cancels his drivers license. (I am still trying to figure how that plays to any kind of sense…without a license how would he reach a job if he found one?) He has been applying for two to thee jobs a day for months now. He has had only one call to come be interviewed. And when he got there, it was not, as it was slyly presented, a job per se, but a temp agency.

He will not work for temp agencies after his experience with them at the last warehouse job he had. He was not a temp there, but a supervisor who saw the temps treated like virtual slaves by their accompanying temp agency supervisors. They were routinely forced to extend their ten hour days to twelve or fourteen hour days, told to report for work on their break days or be fired, forced to grovel for permission to do things like use a bathroom, and screamed at by noisy little men with tiny dicks and nasty interpersonal skills.

They look an awful like a whole new class for America—at least to this amateur philosophy student. Karl Marx would recognize them—he called them the proletariat. They were the class of abused workers he thought would rise to rebel against their masters. Looking at how the temps are treated, I don’t know why murder doesn’t ensue on a weekly basis. Their unpleasant supervisors apparently think they are another class entirely and scarcely treat the temps as human beings.

Ancient Rome had three major class divisions: patricians (once every citizen of Rome), plebians, and slaves. The patricians came to be not every citizen of Rome, but the old families often engaged in priestly or senatorial life of the city and usually well to do. The plebians were the commoners of Rome, but in the early years not necessarily poor. They could be tradesmen or craftsmen and quite well to do, though usually they didn’t own large areas of land in or out of the city as the patrician class came to do. The slaves were the property of the other two classes, of course and didn’t even own themselves.

In America, we have a corporate class of patricians. The plebs of America, aside from new underclassmen at military academies, are the middle to lower middle class. They are shrinking like arctic ice beneath polar bears, too. No doubt, the supervisors who scream at temps, and the companies who hire 75 to 80% of their workers ONLY as temps (Yes, Target is among these in their warehouses), are holding on for dear life to their membership in this shrinking and embattled class. The corporate masters have patrician tastes, but little of the responsible attitude that once marked Rome’s upper class: they make money off stock holdings and not by the sweat of their brows, they don’t care how that stock dividend is earned by the labor of others.

I got to wondering what America’s “patrician” class dreams of in regard to the rest of America. I note there is much media effort to make every American aspire to the things only these new patricians can afford. For instance, this week, north of here much news and film clippage was wasted on the burning of the famed “Street of Dreams”….four houses that would have sold for over a million dollars each. ELF left their signature sheet at the site taking credit. Now, mind you, for someone supposedly doing “war” for the environment, who willfully puts that much toxic smoke into the atmosphere, not to mention burning that much prime lumber, is a complete idiot. Stupid way to “protect” the environment, ELF! But the drivel of “pity us, pity us” from the builders didn’t inspire much sympathy in me either. Street of Dreams? A bunch of houses costing over a million bucks? Whose goddamed dream IS that, anyhow? Not the common American, that is for sure. More Americans would be happy to dream of owning ANY house these days as subprime loans tank. My veteran son can’t even afford rent and groceries. His street of dreams is any job that would make a livable wage and provide some health benefits.

We are becoming a nation fractured into economic lines hardening into fortress-like configurations. We are being routinely lied to about the need to be good consumers who don’t ask exactly what it is we routinely consume. American workers are losing jobs to other nations where workers are treated worse. And those left here who can’t buy stock or occupy shrinking zones of professional life? Well, they are being funneled into the ranks of a new proletariat: the temps. Temps are NOT only illegal immigrants (tho’ many are) or racial minorities and legal immigrants; they are also many of the storied “working poor” and active duty military trying to make ends meet.

There is a more modern example of this kind of class division, and not one that requires reading Marx or playing socialist-communist philosophical games. Remember France, anyone? Remember when those silly spoilt aristocrats lost their heads? America talks equality, and spews rhetoric about respecting veterans; but when it comes to hiring—-well, they want you to work for starvation wages and no benefits. People will only lose so much, men and women will only watch their children hunger for so long. And if I am still alive when all this greed and bullshit hits the fan, yes, by Gods, I will say “I told you so!” and Marx will laugh, possibly in French!