Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Amerika Erwache!

I couldn't sit thru the whole thing, but between what I saw, the transcript, and the analyses I am a bit amazed at how blatantly fascist - as in "right in ol' Schicklgruber's wheelhouse" fascist - a big chunk of last night's State of the Union speech was.

Not the part about the Leader's iron will or fluffing the Party's program; that's just bog-standard political theater, which is all this silly speech ever is, really, and why I usually don't bother to watch or read much about it. It had more chest-beating than usual but, sheesh, Trump, so, yeah.

No, specifically it was the MS-13 horror stories, the part about how the herrnvolk are endangered by a hidden swarm of dusky, violent untermenschen - and nefarious Auslandische foreign powers - and that only the Leader, and the Party - and only by their being hard, hard as Krupp steel (but fair! Fair, mind you, so long as you're not one of the dusky traitors within!) - can save us from their evil.

The fluffing of the Party's program did have some extra GOP lies how they're not selling the country to their rich pals, but, whatever.

But the stuff about America Awake! to the danger of The Eternal Immigrant was such a pure, uncut Steven Miller hommage to the Fuhrer, vintage Adolf whine in a new orange bottle, that I wonder how many people missed that.

Perhaps we've gotten so used to these speeches promising fierce resistance to the Terrorist Foes that we didn't notice how this one slipped into genuine Silvershirt "domestic-enemies-abound!" territory. Another own-goal for the Phony War On Terror. Thanks loads, guys.

Whooda thunk that when it came fascism would neither be wrapped in a flag nor carrying a cross but in the form of a bloated orange real estate grifter, wrapped in a badly tailored but expensive suit and too-long tie, and carrying a Big Mac. Say what you will about the original Nazis, at least they were snappy dressers.

I'm not sure whether I'm more pissed off that the cousin-marryin' hillbillies foisted these downmarket fascists on me, or at how goddamn downmarket the fascists are. Steve Bannon? Seriously? Dude always looks like he's coming down off a three-day cheap-vodka-and-Red Bull bender. Hell, how embarrassing is it that even his Leader, our orange fuhrer, looks like a divorced car salesman shopping for laxative suppositories at WalMart?

Even our Nazis are low-rent.

Sheesh.

Monday, January 22, 2018

...in a quiet way and at an opportune time,

One of my favorite works of fiction is Tim Farrington's The Monk Downstairs. There's nothing weighty about it, it's just a pleasant little tale of life and love, a trifle that I enjoy because Farrington writes with a sort of breathlessly effortless grace, the kind of writing that makes writing feel easy and natural, as if you could just sit down and crank out that sort of perfectly simple yet perfectly weighted prose any time you want to.

But there's also a deeply sorrowful heart to it, and I remembered why I cried the first time I read it, over a dozen years ago but not long after my daughter Bryn was stillborn. It was this, and I hope Mr. Farrington forgives me quoting him at length.

"She had never allowed herself to grieve wholly before, she realized now. Not for her father, not for her grandparents. Not even for her marriage: she'd never allowed herself to face what it meant to fail in the central relationship of her life. To really remember that shining, innocent love she'd felt and everything that had happened to it. And this was why, of course; because some pragmatic, self-protective sense had told her that grief was bottomless. Skirting this sea, she had dipped her toes in; she'd wondered what would happen if she crossed the line, but it had always seemed that it could only be a kind of defeat, a drowning, a death.

And so it was.

But maybe it was not the end, to be defeated by life. Maybe that was even part of what it meant to be a human being; to recognize the way in which life had finally defeated you, to accept the ways in which death had come, to stop looking away from the failures of love, and to grieve.

To keep your heart open in this sea of silence; to drift in it, surrendering to its currents baffled and without recourse.

And at the bottom of it, to be surprised anew by love's simplicity."

And that's really it. It's a sort of munshin, a letting-go, the simple acceptance of the endlessness of grief, the release of struggle and denial against that suffering of loss. Some things are simply too grievous to be borne, and it is the trying to bear them that crushes you beneath their weight. It is only when you simply sink beneath them to that deep, still darkness that your heart and mind can then accept that that grief is part of you and always will be.

That, just as for the note to be there must be silence before, and after, there must be darkness for there to be light.

Knowing that does not lighten the darkness. But it makes the darkness bearable, a part of life instead of a denial of it.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

What's Kurdish for "under the bus"?

The Turkish Army appears to be preparing to throw some additional complexity into the already-eleventh-dimension-chess-game that is post-IS Syria by threatening portions of northwest Syria currently controlled by the Kurdish PYD Party "People's Protection Units" (YPG) armed forces.

The Erdogan government, much like the governments preceding it, sees the YPG as functionally indistinguishable from the Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK, and clearly now that the Islamic State is off the table and the endgame for Syria appears to be closing has decided to take action against the perennial bogeymen of the states of the Anatolian and the Fertile Crescent, the Kurds. Or, at least, one faction of that beleaguered people.

The YPG was central to the US drive to reduce the physical "state" of the Islamic State, providing the only really effective infantry for that campaign. On Tuesday a spokesperson for the "US-led anti-ISIS coalition" tossed the YPG in the Afrin region under the Turkish bus, noting that the YPG in northwest Syria were not within the coalition AO.

I'm not sure how this will work, given that the same article linked above claims that the Trump Administration's cunning Syria plan includes supporting some 30,000 "Syrian Democratic Forces" along the Iraq-Syria border, ostensibly to continue to hunt IS fugitives but strategically to interdict Iraqi and Iranian support for proxies inside Syria such as Hizbullah.

The SDF, however, is pretty much the YPG with ash-and-trash. The YPG fielded something like 50,000 troops, while the Arab portions of the SDF consist of two main groups, the Jaysh al-Thuwar that includes some Turkmen and Kurds but seldom put together more than 2-3,000 fighters, and the Jaysh al-Sanadid militia of the Shammar tribe centered in northeastern Syria and Anbar province in western Iraq. The Shammar could assemble 8-10,000 troops. If the YPG decide to grab their A-bags and beat cheeks there won't be enough "SDF" to provide an interior guard on a porta-potty.

And this is beside the whole "The Kurds get screwed again" meme which seems to be a Middle Eastern thing and one in which the U.S. plays it's own shameful part.

Leaving the YPG units in the northwest to be smashed by Turkish tanks after coopting them to help fight for U.S. political objectives would be in the great tradition of American expeditionary war; maybe the Kurds can find some surviving Vietnamese mountain tribe Mike Force guys who can teach them the Nung term for "buddyfucker".

Once again we're reminded, not so much of Trump Administration incompetence (although that certainly plays a role here), but of the fact that describing the United States' Middle Eastern policy as an actual "policy" - that is, as something developed with a thoughtful consideration of regional realities and American national interests - remains somewhere between risible and tragic.

Or, as the Kurds themselves might observe; "Bikime te, Yankee! EzĂȘ kuza dayika te sor bikim!"

Saturday, January 13, 2018

Now I am become Death

...destroyer of beverage containers.
One of the more awesome things here in Portland is a place called "Trackers". It's a sort of post-hippie/pre-Apocalyptic-wasteland-skills-learning-center thing, where kids (and adults) can learn to smith blades, skin critters, build boats, track animals, and raise chickens. Plus there's live-action-roleplaying. It's damn good fun, is what it is.

There's also an indoor bow range, which is where I enjoy Saturday mornings letting the gray goose (or, in this case, the primary-colored-plastic) fly.

We used to do this as a family but, sadly, like so many of our other "family" things, the rest of the gang slipped away. The Boy never did have any interest, the Girl still goes from time to time but has little real interest, and my Bride has lost any real impetus to get out of bed early on a Saturday.

So Saturdays it's just me and Subutai. That's "Subutai" I'm firing at left. It's a Samick SKB, a modern Korean version of the northeast Asian horsebow. Very light and small but an easy draw and fires a very flat arrow. I can shoot all day without tiring, and when my eye is in and my form good I can put a dozen arrows inside a dinner plate at 15 yards.

Plus it's fun for trick shooting. This was after a series of "Parthian shots", starting with my back to the target, turning, drawing, and releasing, as a horse archer would who had drawn his enemy after him by feigning flight.
What's odd about this is the number of people I run into on the bow range who don't consider this practicing with a deadly weapon. They wouldn't touch a firearm and consider the gun-nuttery of the ammosexuals down at Tri-County distasteful, or at least faintly louche. Any yet this was the original weapon of mass destruction. While God may have made Man, and Sam Colt may have made them equal, the bow was the first tool that made men able to kill other men without all that chancy risk beating them down with a rock or stick.

It's just been so long since we commonly killed people with bows that we forget that.

People are funny that way.

Friday, January 12, 2018

At ease, disease

So. Here's the thing.

I've spent some time in the sort of less-paved parts of the world we're talking about today.
And I'll be straight-up with you; the term I used to describe them was, typically, "Third World shitholes".

But.

At that time I was a paratroop sergeant, NOT Chief Executive of the world's largest superpower.

If you can't see the critical distinction there, you're a goddamn moron.

Or Donald Trump.
But I repeat myself.