the rix mix

 What is nailed to granite
takes us hostage to a myth of optimism,
a community where no babies
are abandoned in garbage cans,
wise old women in lawn chairs
fanning themselves with astrological charts,
highways repaved but never widened,
all retail clerks brothers and sisters,
motorized skateboards,
good manners among neighbors,
no one too rich or too poor,
the serene aftermath of war
our fertile real estate.

 A cat in the dark alley
 knocks over a garbage can,
cockroaches pass through poison
as through a slightly unusual room,
don't be afraid, what you see
is a reflection in the window
of an oriental woman
peeking over her glasses
while she works at a sewing machine.

A soldier clothed in green patina
marches past the public library
for his proud Gold Star Mother.

We are taught our wars are kindnesses,
favors we do for our enemies.

Peace is also a litany of greed,
fading uniforms, reams of paper
with secrets printed on them.

Waking up in a strange hospital,
hearing the butterflies screaming.

Labels: poem, war more war

Gold Star Mother, to you
the honor of a white Cadillac
at the front of the parade.

Your slow steps
escorting the wreath
up the gray slate path
to the war monument
by the public library.

Each clang of the fire engine bell
is the face of someone's son.

Four old soldiers aim
rifles at the blue sky,
a nervous boy plays "Taps."

They rest there for weeks,
your ribbons & fading flowers.


 

Labels: growing up, holidays, poem, war more war

November 2, 2012 Iraq contractor to pay $85M for toxic exposure 

 PORTLAND, ORE. A jury on Friday ordered an American military contractor to pay $85 million after finding it guilty of negligence for illnesses suffered by a dozen Oregon soldiers who guarded an oilfield water plant during the Iraq war. 

After a three-week trial, the jury deliberated for just two days before reaching a decision against the contractor, Kellogg Brown and Root. 

The suit was the first concerning soldiers' exposure to a toxin at a water plant in southern Iraq. The soldiers said they suffer from respiratory ailments after their exposure to sodium dichromate, and they fear that a carcinogen the toxin contains, hexavalent chromium, could cause cancer later in life.

This is just the beginning. There are also suits over poisoning from garbage burn pits in Itaq & Afghanistan. I was thinking about this kind of tragic, long-lasting outcome of the Iraq War before the war began. Why weren't the loudest, most out-spoken pro-war veterans then looking out for these future veterans?

Labels: Iraq, war more war

Taliban shoot 14-year old human rights activist

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Taliban gunmen in Pakistan shot and seriously wounded on Tuesday a 14-year-old schoolgirl who rose to fame for speaking out against the militants, authorities said.

Malala Yousufzai was shot in the head and neck when gunmen fired on her school bus in the Swat valley, northwest of the capital, Islamabad. Two other girls were also wounded, police said.

Yousufzai became famous for speaking out against the Pakistani Taliban at a time when even the government seemed to be appeasing the hardline Islamists. The government agreed to a ceasefire with the Taliban in Swat in early 2009, effectively recognizing insurgent control of the valley whose lakes and mountains had long been a tourist attraction.

The Taliban set up courts, executed residents and closed girls' schools, including the one that Yousufzai attended. A documentary team filmed her weeping as she explained her ambition to be a doctor.

"My friend came to me and said, 'for God's sake, answer me honestly, is our school going to be attacked by the Taliban?'," Yousufzai, then 11, wrote in a blog published by the BBC.

"During the morning assembly we were told not to wear colorful clothes as the Taliban would object."

The army launched an offensive and retook control of Swat later that year, and Yousufzai later received the country's highest civilian award. She was also nominated for international awards for child activists. Since then, she has received numerous threats. On Tuesday, gunmen arrived at her school and asked for her by name, witnesses told police. Yousufzai was shot when she came out of class and went to a bus.

Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said his group was behind the shooting. "She was pro-West, she was speaking against Taliban and she was calling President Obama her idol," Ehsan said by telephone from an undisclosed location.

"She was young but she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas," he said, referring the main ethnic group in northwest Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan. Most members of the Taliban come from conservative Pashtun tribes.

Doctors were struggling to save Yousufzai, said Lal Noor, a doctor at the Saidu Sharif Teaching Hospital in the Swat valley's main town of Mingora. (Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Robert Birsel)

I realize it might be boorish to place this in a partisan context, but when a courageous, young Pakistani woman risks death calling President Obama her idol, our president is doing something right. It's probably not just the President, but also the two strong women with whom he is associated: His life partner, Michelle, & his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

I'm hardly in full accord with Obama's Afghanistan policy, the surge or the withdrawal timetable. But it was the Cheney/Bush administration that put Afghanistan on the backburner & invaded Iraq just as we had driven the Taliban from power & sent their broken, humiliated remnants fleeing into the hills. We didn't finish the job, which was to eliminate Bin Laden, quickly hand over Kabul to whatever inevitable corrupt regime was coalescing there, & get the hell out.

Under Cheney/Bush, America did project to Muslims around the world, a very diverse population by no means represented only by Iranian radical Shiites or Saudi Wahhabi fundamentalists, that American power was indeed waging a war on all of Islam. They obliterated whatever good will had been generated by President Clinton's defense of the Bosnian Muslims, & global sympathy for the United States following the 9/11 attacks. Obama was stuck with that, tried as best he could, given the pressures upon him, to allow the Arab Spring to follow whatever course of self-determination people in the Arab world were choosing for it. One young freedom-loving voice in non-Arab Pakistan admired him.

Mitt Romney can never inspire young people in the same way, here & around the world. He has allied himself with the American Taliban.   He has gathered around him the same "nation-building" neocon lunatic ideologues that gave us weapons of mass destruction in Iraq & changed their tune only after it was exposed as an evil lie. In league with the corporate- war profiteers these neocons are at this very moment conspiring a war against Iran as one of Mitt's first acts of "foreign policy."

Labels: blogging against theocracy, in the news, war more war

At the end of the day 9/11/01 I had an entirely different conception of "evil" than when the day began. Mainly, I was certain it existed in the world & one could not call it anything else.

Evil manifests itself through humans & our actions & institutions. I had been confusing evil with something else, something in the natural order of things. What I observed in nature could be a "fallen" world. But it wasn't evil.

I understood why theologian Paul Tillich, who repudiated supernaturalism, used the word demonic & used it quite often. He had experienced WWI from the German side & witnessed the rise of Hitler.

I haven't found the word to describe how 9/11 changed me. The term conservatism doesn't apply. Certainly related, but not in a political or even religious sense. Not how it's used in America.

Labels: in the news, religion, war more war

USHUAIA, Argentina (Reuters) - Argentine President Cristina Fernandez marked the 30th anniversary of the Falklands war on Monday with sharp criticism of Britain for maintaining "colonial enclaves" and a renewed call for sovereignty talks.

First of all, the British, Spanish & French all laid claim to the uninhabited islands now known as The Falklands. Had the Spanish claim stood, Argentina could have inherited it. But neither the British nor Argentinians have natural sovereignty over the islands. They're 290 miles from South America.

Second, The Falklands are a self-governing British Overseas Territory, & the inhabitantS are & consider themselves British citizens, not a colonized,  oppressed indigenous people, since The Falklands had no indigenous people to conquer.

 When the Argentinian military attacked & occupied the Falklands on April 2, 1982, I was working at Upsala College Bookstore.  After the Brits decided to retake the Islands (What else would one expect them to do?) & dispatched a naval task force, we taped a map of the North & South Atlantic Oceans to a wall & followed the progress of the fleet. We were rooting for the Brits all the way.  Not because we cared so much about The Falklands, but because Argentina was ruled by a despotic military junta that was torturing & "disappearing" thousands of Argentinians. Their invasion had to be a desperate effort to prop up a tottering government, & the inevitable  British victory would likely knock it over altogether. It was a terrible miscalculation by the Argentina military, especially the navy, which may have thought Britain's cost-saving decision to withdraw an ice patrol vessel from the South Atlantic , its only ship  on regular duty there,  indicated an unwillingness to defend The Falklands. Britain had no contingency military plans for an Argentinian invasion. 

The British keep a first rate navy & very tough Royal Marines for just this sort  of problem. They were not going to allow free British citizens  with British rights to fall under the rule of the Argentinian junta, period. So it was, in my opinion, a war of liberation. Plus there was the matter of potential oil & mineral discoveries Great Britain was no way surrendering. 

There was never a doubt in my mind or the minds of my coworkers that the Brits would win this one. Might be tougher than they expected, & was, but win they would. The United States Navy thought it was impossible

Labels: in the news, war more war

When the shock wore off after  I read about the insane United States Army sergeant killing 16 Afghans, including nine children,  my first thought was that it means the end of our effective involvement in Afghanistan.  There's already been "thrill killings" by U.S. personnel, drone bombings that don't discriminate between the "enemy" & their families; & burnings of the Koran that, inadvertent or not, many Americans including at least one Republican candidate for president treat with contempt, as if one indignity  can justify another.

We will never convince Afghans that we are not at war against Islam. Who is the enemy when a United States soldier creepy crawls through homes like a follower of Charles Manson & murders people in their beds? These were Afghans in a supposed "secured" area.

It won't do to psychologically profile the crazy soldier as a complete anomaly. When a soldier is posted to combat areas four times, suffers a physical brain trauma, has his marriage fall apart, & our military psych fitness screeners still don't pick up on something awry in the guy's head, stamp MAJOR FAIL somewhere on the process. How many other disturbed solders have gotten though it?

President Obama still has not given us a lucid purpose for our Afghanistan campaign, or  clear picture of what constitutes American success. It seems more or less a continuation of whatever President George W. Bush had in mind.

How big is Afghanistan?  Here's a page that overlays Afghanistan on five sections of The United States.  Keep in mind that only some parts of America are rugged as Afghanistan.

The Afghan people, except for some warlords & corrupt Karzai government officials, are done cooperating with us. Karzai wants us to pull back to our major bases from our many outposts. Those outposts were our ground tactics for securing areas  from the Taliban.

Labels: in the news, war more war