That's Amore!

This little video seems to have gone viral, and if you watch I think you'll see why.Even my friends jim and Lisa, hard-headed realists that they are, were captivated (which is where I found this - thanks, guys!)

Anyway, you know I'm a sucker for romance, so I'm getting viral like everyone else. But...in a sense, this is both sweet (since this guy obviously wanted their engagement to be really, really memorable) and scary. Because this little skit took dozens of friends and must have taken hours of rehearsal; who the hell has the time and energy for that?

After they have kids they're gonna look back on this in wonder; where the hell DID all that time go..?

De Morituris

I have a post that has been my standard for Memorial Day for years. But this year I'd like to think less about those gone than those still here.

Since 2003 the U.S. seems to have slipped into a bizarre schizophrenia. Our attitude towards the expeditionary wars we have ginned up since the end of the punitive campaign in Afghanistan has varied between a cynical resignation to a hesitant distaste. Meanwhile, our attitude towards the ridiculously small, self-selected group of people who have fought them "for" us has varied between a sort of passive bumper-sticker patriotism to an exaggeratedly disproportionate "gratitude". Charlie Pierce has a fairly good summation of this;

"Now, for the veterans of the two wars of the past decade, we're giving them all kinds of favors and goodies and public applause, and maybe even a parade or two, overcompensating our brains out, but, ultimately, what does all the applause mean at the end of the day? We are apparently fine with two more years of vets coming home from Afghanistan, from a war that 60 percent of us say we oppose. But we support The Troops. Will we become a more skeptical nation the next time a bunch of messianic fantasts concoct a war out of lies? Perhaps, but we support The Troops. Will we tax ourselves sufficiently to pay for what it costs to care for the people we send to one endless war and one war based on lies? Well, geez, we'll have to think about that, but we support The Troops."

The Army I joined, the post-Vietnam, pre-Reagan Army of the early Eighties, had a pretty cynical attitude. We'd seen our brothers, the men who were our platoon sergeants and First Sergeants, used up and then tossed away in RIFs after the end of a war that we tried desperately to pretend that we'd "won" because we were never beaten in the field. We referred to the Army as "the Green Machine" and had a pretty good understanding what the priority of "accomplishing the mission" meant to the "welfare of the troops" if the mission meant that a lot of those troops would die for and in the usual ratio of "pointless" to "contributing-to-the-accomplishing-the-mission".

We understood - because we'd seen it or lived through it - that our "leaders" both civilian and military would "lead" us into unprofitable wars, lie to us about their cunning plans to "win" them, and then toss us aside like used contraceptive devices after the inevitable ugly mess ensued. We had heard the rhetoric about "freedom" and "peace" and knew that as often as those terms meant their face value they were a happy-face sticker for "whatever advances our policy" and "make a wasteland". We were ready to do the things our government told us to do while being pretty cynical about the combination of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision that determined the way our government would decide what those things were and how they would sell them to the herd.

This stands in fairly dramatic contrast to the current volunteer force, where supposedly: "Six out of seven soldiers and Army civilians, [a new study] reveals, trust their senior leaders to make the right decisions for the Army, and 90 percent of those surveyed remain willing to put the Army’s needs above their own."

This trusting and sacrificing seem both disproportionate and inappropriate after the concatenation of lies, damn lies, and statistics that have characterized the "War on Terror". It would seem to me that having watched one administration lie it's way one war and another continue a second long after it's sell-buy date that it would behoove my country and all Americans to pause on the day we set aside to honor those killed in wars and consider just exactly what it means to "trust" their "leaders" with the lives of their fellow citizens absent any indication that that government, and those leaders, are willing to do the hard calculus to ensure that the exchange of those lives in return for the advancement of the national interest is a transaction that justifies the cost in wrecked lives and shattered bodies.

So. I'd like to think that this Memorial Day that my fellow citizens would do more than just pat the yellow-ribbon magnet on their bumper in a hat-tip to those of my fellow soldiers who went to do their nation's bidding and never returned. I'd like to think that those citizens would remember that the intent of the Founders and Framers was that We the People are supposed to be sovereign.

That it is supposed to be in our names those lives are given or taken, and that if we allow - or, worse, encourage - those who we elect to throw those lives away in the pursuit of lies, or impossibilities, and then once those lies and that nonsense are exposed, do not hold those people and ourselves to account, then we have failed to honor our pledge to them, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And, hey; I like tradition as much as the next guy.

From The Forehead of Zeus

I want to invite everyone here to visit our friend Labrys for a trip in the U.S. Army M7TARDIS to Ft. Maclellan, Alabama for Women's Army Corps Basic Training, 1974.

"I hate running, I hate hot weather. So how on earth did I end up in Women's Army Corps Basic Training in Ft. McClellan, Alabama in August of 1974? I would have done most anything to get the hell out of Kansas. My father laughed and said "So my little girl is joining the Whore Corps."

As much as there is very little that remains of the Army I knew, Labrys brings to life an Army that literally no longer exists except in memory, and does it with her usual frank brilliance.

I can't recommend her post too highly, both for her subject as well as her writing. What better way to begin the Memorial Day remembrance? Go; read. You won't regret it.

And don't forget to ask her to keep going - she remembers another place and time that have almost vanished; the U.S. Army, Europe in the Seventies, and the Bavarian glories of Flint Kaserne. Hoch, hoch, Labrys!

The Army I Knew: Indigestion on Honeybun Hill (SFQC 2)

So when we last peeked in on the U.S. Army and PFC Chief circa 1981 we were loafing around the 1st COSCOM area over on the far side of Smoke Bomb Hill and the piney woods of Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, waiting for the opportunity to become a one of America's Best, the Green Berets.

(First - I should tell you; I have no photos of the actual places and people of this part of my story. I have, instead, used images of the places I went at other times, and with other people)

What I was actually doing was officially known as "pre-phase" and was the holding unit for the JFK Special Warfare Center and School's first phase of the SF enlisted Qualification Course.

(This guy, by the way, is supposed to be the "Special Forces Memorial Statue" and in my day he stood outside the front of JFKSWC and was universally known as "Bronze Bruce" or "The Gay Beret" from his limp-wristed posture)

Now the Army hates idleness in general and idle enlisted scum in particular, so though there really was no instruction to be done there the troops foregathering amongst the Cosmonites were kept as busy as the Army and USAJFKSWCS could keep us.

Which principally involved PT.

We PT'ed in the morning and again in the afternoon. Between the pushups and sidestraddle hops we ran, everywhere, and were introduced to the specialty of the special forces, speed ruck-marching.

This was a particularly grueling torture, involving a relatively light load - about 20 to 30 pounds in the rucksack plus the LBE (the "load bearing equipment" harness that supported our essential fighting tools; ammunition pouches, field dressing, compass, and canteens). The luckier among us had been issued the old cotton web belt and suspenders. These had one drawback - they tended to absorb sweat in the summer - offset by the immense plus of being cuddly soft and flexible.

(N.B. - this is me, two years later but still wearing my old cotton web LBE)

The less fortunate had to put up with the newer artificial fiber variety, which was supposed to be more durable but was also nastily stiff and rough; it was misery under the rucksack where the V-strap shoulder harness would gouge and tear at your neck. Although most of the more experienced guys - the E-4's and above - knew enough to pad their necks with an OD sling bandage (known in GI slang as a "drive-on rag") the cadre were like all cadre everywhere and were death on the drive-on rags. You could wear them, but only if you could keep them tucked down under your collar.

So loaded up, drive-on rags tucked safely away, we would take off at a fast marching pace. And by fast I mean fast; when we were moving well we were striding out just short of a moderately slow jog. These rucks were usually at least as long as a PT run; several miles, and sometimes more. And while the primary object was speed, the other requirement was murder - keeping formation.

Because like almost all route marches, our column was nearly constantly stretching and collapsing.

The GI term for this is the "accordion effect". Truly well-trained units can reduce the number of times it happens and the severity of the accordion. But I suspect that even the best marching outfits get hit now and then.

It's worst for the guys in the back, largely because they usually can't see what's going on up ahead, and especially if the guys in front slow down gradually so that the slowdown isn't really noticeable.

Because what happens is that the leaders get going again, and the guys behind them take a moment - a fraction of a second or so, maybe - to see the front guys speed away and close the gap. Every successive rank in the column adds another fraction of a second or so to the lag, so by the time the guys in the back start moving the front of the column is pelting away at a run. The poor bastards in the back then have to beat cheeks like their hair was on fire and the water bucket was in the road ahead, rucksacks slamming up and down, equipment flapping and jouncing.

Repeat this four, six, or seven times over the course of a couple of miles.

You can see how the guys in the back might get a trifle winded.

And that was pretty much that; runs, rucks, and a handful of offhand "classes" simply designed to get bodies in shape for the real business; Phase I of SFQC.

My Phase I started the way most of everyone's training adventures started back in those days; with the arrival of the "Silversides" 80-Pax trucks.

I hope you're impressed by the picture - I had to hunt like hell to find it. That is an "80-Pax", "cattle truck" or "Silversides" - I honestly I have no idea whether the Army still uses these things, but they were everywhere in the Eighties. They were just like the picture suggests they were; a civilian-type tractor and slab-sided trailer with two tall doors on the right side and rear. They had no seats other than benches down the center and along the sides, but you never sat down in them unless you were pulling some sort of Hollywood detail. You stood, grabbing the vertical poles or horizontal rails, or someone's head, or the side of the truck. They were hot in summer, freezing in winter, and rode like their suspension was made of steel rods. As a method of moving objects, they were efficient and practical.

As transportation for humans, they pretty much sucked.

I rode them to and from ranges and everywhere else in Basic and AIT, and later as a paratrooper we rode them down to Green Ramp at Pope Air Force Base to get 'chuted up to jump, or to fly off to high adventure

(that is, to somewhere usually dank and dirty, where we spent anywhere between several days to several months getting tired, bored, and filthy - adventure generally means reading about someone else's misery a long way away and long time off)

in distant lands. Just seeing the image slams me with the memory of vicious exhaustion, the reek of sweaty cotton and unwashed GIs, and distant angry voices shouting "Get the fuck in there, you fucking numbnuts! Stand on your rucksack! We need to get another fifty people on this goddamn truck!"

This trip was no different; we were jammed into these things and driven off into the piney woods for an hour or so, and then dumped out into some sort of backwoods shotgun shack village, shoved into line, and shaken down by a band of screaming lunatics.

That was my introduction to Camp Mackall, North Carolina

(Later I did some research and found out that Mackall really has a hell of a history. For all that Fort Bragg and Fort Benning like to preen about their Airborne pedigrees the real "Home of the U.S. Army Airborne" is Camp Mackall. Pretty much all the WW2 airborne troops trained there, and the post, knocked together in 1942 from pine woods and peach orchards, was the training and staging area for the 82nd Airborne long before the artillery gave up Ft. Bragg to the east.)

the location for the 1st and 3rd Phases of the SFQC.

(Here's Mackall - actually, then "Camp Hoffmann" - in 1943)

And that was very much the style of the first week of Phase I; lots of running, lots of screaming, and lots of frantic - but, in retrospect, pretty pointless - action.

This was the effect of the privates, I suspect.

The thing is that nothing we did in those early weeks of Phase I really did anything to make us smarter, more efficient, more cunning, ruthless soldiers, make us more clever at working with foreign fighters, make us into more intelligent individualistic soldiers.

It weeded out the frightened, the completely unfit, and unwilling, and - occasionally - the merely unlucky.

But it was not really a very smart way to make "special" soldiers.

And I'm convinced that is because so many of us really shouldn't have been there.

Many of us - the genuine trainees - just didn't have anything that would have helped us learn what we should have been learning. We were essentially civilians with a lick of O.D. paint on the outside.

We had, most of us, done little real work, and had little or no experience with real hardship, or with gutting out a difficult task under stressful conditions. Most of us had never been hungry, or sleepless, for any real time. We had no experience with the simplest of tactical tasks, or even living outside, other than the sad simulacrum we had enjoyed in Basic Training.

So the SF cadre had to treat us, and did, like fools, that is, like recruit privates. And that's not what a special forces soldier is supposed to be, but that's what we were.

The 1981 Phase I SFQC consisted or roughly eight weeks.

Two weeks of "general subjects", which was just more physical conditioning with some idle crap and fairly ridiculous "hand-to-hand combat" thrown in because, I'm convinced, somebody saw something like it in some World War 2 commando movie.

Two weeks of Land Navigation,

Two weeks of Starvation Survival, and

Two weeks of Patrolling.

I can't really tell the story of the whole course, so I'll try and give you just what I remember as the highlights.

The thing I remember most about the first couple of weeks were just the small change of living at Mackall.

The "barracks" were wooden shacks without doors or windows; just rectangular cutouts at the ends. They had concrete floors and metal-frame bunks with plywood planks for "beds"; you just rolled out your rubber lady (the old green rubber inflatable air mattress, although the foam sleeping mat was coming in to replace the "deflatable" piece of shit just as I arrived) and your fart-sack or your poncho liner and there you were.

They kept out the rain, though.

The latrines were real special, though; the only fourteen-hole pit toilet I've ever seen in a lifetime of camping and military service.

I shit you not; the actual crappers were arranged like a ginormous horizontal ferris wheel, each conventional toilet seat screwed down to a huge plywood disc that sat over a ten-foot diameter concrete pipe stuck vertically into the ground. You just walked up, smiled to your neighbor grunting and farting away two seats over, sat down, and opened fire.

They were fairly foul, and were made worse by trooper's habit of taking sodas onto the crapper (later in cycle when we got "pop privileges") and then hucking the empties down the hole. The suck-truck that came every week or two to drain the vile broth inside these hellmouths continually plugged and broke down trying to suck up these cans. At one point later in my cycle all the privates were marched off to have a swim and the student-NCOs (who had been tasked with enforcing the no-pop-cans-in-the-shitters rule) were offered buckets and ropes and told that they could choose to clean the cans out of the unspeakable wheatina down in the latrine-holes...or terminate the course right there; choose to drop out of the course with no chance of ever retaking it or joining the Special Forces.

I'm told that two sergeants rode back to Ft. Bragg that night.

From used food my thoughts turn to actual food, which was an obsession with all of us by that point.

I can honestly say that SFQC may well have been the longest, hardest continual work I ever did, in the Army or elsewhere. We were awake something like 15 to 17 hours a day and doing some sort of physical work almost all during that time, including some of the most demanding running and ruck-marching I've ever done. We must have been using somewhere on the order of 4,000 calories a day, and in General Subjects week we got probably about 2,000 or 3,000 going in; two cooked ("hot A") meals for breakfast and dinner and a canned food ("C-ration") at noon.

We were all constantly hungry.

The breakfast was, as Army hot A breakfasts usually were, the best meal of the day; eggs, bacon or sausage, flapjacks or waffles, toast or biscuits (and, this being the Army which meant you ate "Southern" wherever you were, cream gravy), and lots of damn hot, damn black coffee.

Oh - and I can't possibly forget this - the entire time we ate chow the cadre played the entire "Ballad of the Green Beret" album by SSG Barry Sadler over the PA system.

You've probably never heard this shit, but, I swear; if every copy ever pressed was suddenly and instantaneously destroyed - not all that bad an idea, really - I could reconstruct it, instrumentals and all, I heard it, every freaking day, over and over, to the point where thirty years later I STILL remember the horrible songs. You can't imagine how sad that makes me.

It's an awful country-western sort of thing. The famous song is the ballad of the title, you know, the one that talks about "fearless men, who jump and die"? That one? But there's more, so much more. There's an awful song about Saigon. Another one about nurses. And one about "garritroopers" - those REMFs that have sat around behind every army since Marius' day - only it's misspelled "garet trooper":

"He’s got a hip knife, a side knife, a boot knife, a shoulder knife
And a little bitty one that’s a combination flare gun, dinner set,
and genuine police whistle..."

Ugh. Barry Fucking Sadler; if he hadn't shot himself in the head in Guatemala I'd have to shoot him myself.

Let's get the hell off this subject.

Anyway, of all the yummy SF breakfast treats the big local delicacy was - and this was when the company was purely a local Southern thing - Krispy Kreme pastries; nasty oversweetened dough slathered with a layer of sugar so thick that when cool it solidified into a waxy white rind that cracked when you bit into them.

For a hungry soldier, they were fucking outstanding.

The Krispy Kreme products were so beloved that the last incline leading back to the camp gate was known as "Honeybun Hill" after the most disgustingly over-sweet fat-pill offered at morning chow. I'm not sure about anyone else, but the thought of getting outside of those evil things dragged me up that hill more than once.

And that was pretty much that; lots of healthy exercise and Army training. And then it was on to Land Nav.

Land Navigation was both genuinely challenging and good training. A low-ranking U.S. Army soldier, for all that we like to talk about how individualistic and well-trained our troopers are, isn't in practice that much better off than his old Soviet counterpart who couldn't read - not maps, anyway - and drank antifreeze strained through a bread loaf. Most of had passed some little piddly compass courses in Basic, of course, and had the rudiments of map- and compass-reading, but SF Land Nav was hard, really hard, and it forced you to learn how to move long distances through rough terrain and get where you were going.

The training I got at Mackall has stayed with me, and served me well, all the rest of my life. But ask me to remember "Land Nav" and what I recall is desperately trying to lope down the firebreak roads in the dark fearfully eying every bush and oddly-shaped tree for fear it was one of the cadre trying to catch a "road-runner".

We were warned never to use the firebreaks. If I had been more veteran I would have understood that roads and trails were places where enemies would place mines, or site ambushes, and that to use the roads and trails was to ask death to sit down and share a honeybun with you.

But at the time, all we saw were trackless tangles of wait-a-minute vines and shitty terrain alongside lovely, open, level sandy roadways. So we ALL tried to run the roads, and the cadre tried to catch us. Some got caught; the first catch was a warning, the second, automatic "re-cycle" - a return to COSCOM and beginning the next Phase I all over.

None of us wanted to be recycled.

We learned to read the terrain, to interpret the topographic lines as ridges, hills, and gullies. We learned to shoot azimuths on the run, and dodge around obstacles first left, then right, to stay in a rough line. We learned how to find our way through a place we had never been with nothing more than a piece of paper and a magnetic needle, and that's no small thing.

Next was Survival.

We called it "Starvation", because midway through Phase I we were reduced to two C-ration meals a day. A C-rat (and the Eighties C-rats were held by the Vietnam guys to be practically haute cuisine compared to the earlier C's, although they all bitched about not getting the issue cigarettes, especially Camels) contains about 1,500 calories if you eat every fucking scrap including the O.D. metal shavings inside the Beef With Spiced Sauce can.

Picky gourmets that we were, we usually ate just the main meals - although even starving nearly everyone still rejected the awful "Ham and Eggs, Chopped", a disgusting yellowish loaf widely believed to have been pressed from used diapers - the canned fruit, jam, and the candy.

The crackers and toffee-chocolate bars sucked the fluid right out of you, and outside the pound cake the various "dust rolls" (supposedly cinnamon and chocolate nut rolls) acted like sponges and sucked up a canteen of water just in the chewing.

So we were now getting something seriously less than 4,000 calories a day and still working like mine slaves; the weight melted off us. We were so starved that we had no problem eating pets and livestock.

OK, well, rabbits aren't exclusively "pets", but you get the idea. We learned how to kill and clean small game as well as getting some pretty ludicrous instruction on trapping and hunting that might have kept us alive had we been forced to live off a captive game farm. However, as a nice suburban kid I did learn that, no, meat doesn't come from a store and have never since been squeamish about butchering my own meat. When you think about it, that's not a bad lesson, either.

The largest single meal we ate during the entire two weeks came in the form of an entire haunch of goat for our squad.

This animal, a rather bold-smelling billy, was used as a teaching tool on how to kill and butcher a medium- to large animal. We sat through the last moments of the goat and the ensuing lecture with barely-contained frenzy; the minute the lesson concluded were bounded away to choose our method of preparing our meaty bounty; smoking? Roasting? How should we treat this scrumptious largesse to best produce the appropriate gorging glut of protein.

We had settled on smoking, constructed our smoker to U.S. Army specifications, and were already salivating at the delicious goaty flavor drifting up with the ash smoke when the camp commandant arrived.

We had little prior contact with this exquisite, who lorded it over us with Olympian detachment, but he seemed to look on us at that moment as fellows, as his comrades. He asked us how we were doing (wonderfully, we all said loyally, of course). He made some observations about our smoker.

And then he began to tell us about Lucky, the goat.

Lucky, it seemed, had been the most precious and adorable of kids. As a goat, he had been grown to be everyone's pet, a figure of universal love and tenderness, the very embodiment of a sort of goatish Special Forcesness. The commandant described Lucky's many playful antics, his gentle and loving nature, and his long and faithful service as the Camp mascot. Through the years he had proven to be a goat of precocious ingenuity, almost human lovability, and had followed the commandant with the devotion of a faithful dog.

And now we were going to fucking eat him.

I'd like to say that we felt too guilty to consume the backside of this wonderful goat. I'd like to tell you we sobbed as we bid farewell to the quarter of the beloved Lucky that had become ours. But I won't kid you.

We just felt a little crummy afterwards.

That, and the fact is that smoked goat tastes a lot like goat smells.

Then there was bunny baseball. But, hell, this story is long enough as it is.

Finally there was Patrolling.

As a medic this was the hardest part of Phase I for me. I had no idea what we were doing when we started. I had to learn in a week what the infantry guys had been doing for months. It's a tribute to the cadre that I learned it and can still, to this day, remember how to write a five-paragraph operations order. I learned as fast as I could - and I learn pretty fast - and tried damn hard to become an infantry sergeant in two weeks.

Unfortunately, two weeks is not a long time, learning is not the same as knowing, and trying not the same as doing.

And on top of the patrolling we added a new stress to go with the hunger; sleeplessness.

Prior to Patrolling Week we had been going on five to seven hours of sleep a night. Now we were reduced to catnaps of two hours or less. Four hours of unbroken sleep was an unspeakable luxury. Most of us were - although we didn't realize it - operating a something like 40 to 50 percent of our peaks. We were still going, however, still pushing ahead to that tantalizing doorway to Phase II and (for the medics) nearly half a year of poontang and playtime at the paradise of Fort Sam Houston.

But for me, it didn't happen.

I failed my first graded patrol; as assistant patrol leader I was in charge at the Objective Rally Point as my PL and his squad leaders went to recon the objective. As I made my way around the circle of bodies the pine woods exploded with a single shot; one of the M-60 gunners had been fooling with his charging handle and had let the bolt go forward, firing a blank round.

I stumbled on, as a regular troop; raids, recons, movements-to-contact, wedge formations, ranger files, ORPs, passages of lines...finally I got a second chance. As Patrol Leader all I had to do was move a short distance, find a hide position, set up a patrol base, and wait.

I fucked up.

I set the guys in place - in groups of three, "33%", so two could sleep while one pulled security - knowing how stoned we all were. I went around and around the perimeter, shaking and kicking troops awake. Finally, I was beat. I woke my APL, told him to give me fifteen minutes sleep, and laid down on the bare ground.

I was shaken awake by a grinning trooper of the 82nd.

"You die, GI!" he crowed, dragging his finger across my throat, and ran on.

All I remember of the next day was walking across a sunny clearing with the machinegun on my hip, and the instructor-walker pulling me aside; literally pulling me, as I was responding pretty much to direct stimuli only. Sitting on the ground listening to him explain that I had failed my second graded patrol, and was being recycled. Getting on the deuce-and-a-half and feeling the early summer sun warm on my face and wondering if the sky was ever so blue anywhere else.

I don't remember feeling peculiar, or unusual, or anything different than my what-I-thought-of-as-my-usual-self on that ride back to Ft. Bragg. I sat, and made idle talk, and dozed; I didn't understand why the guys in there with me, the other recycles, kept looking at me so oddly.

It was much later that one of them told me that all the while I was in the back of that truck chatting, and napping, and sitting I was crying constantly but silently, without so much as a sob or sniffle, just the two bright tear-falls that never stopped.

He said it was the creepiest thing he'd ever seen.

And so I returned to the old wooden WW2 barracks on COSCOM Hill having failed to do something I desperately wanted to do for the first time in my life. To find that the rest of my life had been waiting for me there.

(Next time: Almost Airborne, or, Are You SURE That Hat's Supposed To Look Like That?)

Some son-of-a-bitch would die

Filed under the heading of "can we have a better effing media" is this article from the LA Times; L.A. gun buyback yields rocket launcher, assault weapons.

"A $2,000 pair of pocket pistols and a military rocket launcher -- sans rocket -- were among the 1,673 firearms that Los Angeles residents traded in for gift cards in the city’s gun buyback this weekend."

reads the first paragraph of this little item.

Charlie Pierce goes wild with this, asking;

"Who in the holy hell goes out and buys a freaking rocket launcher? What are you hunting? Traffic helicopters? And then, who in the holy hell turns it in to the cops? Shouldn't this engage the interest of the FBI's crack Set-Up-The-Loonies unit that has been so successful elsewhere?"

and on the face of it, given the newspaper article, his concern seems like a legitimate one.

But - speaking as someone who has had his rocket launchers in the day - wellll...let's just say that there are "rocket launchers" and "rocket launchers".

If this thing was, say, the "launcher" section from an RPG-7, well, that's bad. That really is a "rocket launcher"; you get your hands on the grenade round and you're in business.

But if this thing was - as I suspect it was - the dunnage from an old LAW or an AT-4, well, frankly, that's just a piece of fiberglass pipe. It's expendable, and is somewhere between difficult and impossible to reload. It's issued as a unit, launcher and projectile, and once it's fired the "launcher's" only real use as a weapon is as a bludgeon and not a very effective one, at that.

I will not disagree that the U.S. is pretty freaking ridiculous on who can tote around what weapon and why, but not sure that the whole "rocket launcher" thing here is really the cherry on the top of the self-licking ice cream sundae.

But you'd never know that from this article, and I suspect that there's one of two reasons for that;

First, it's possible that the LAPD did not produce the "rocket launcher" for the reporter, or describe it other than as such. In which case, one would think that the stupid fucking reporter would have asked an actual question, you know, like reporters in movies do, about the exact nature of this weapon.

Or, second, it's possible that the police DID produce the thing, and the reporter stared at it like a cow at the minutes of the Council of Trent, and ambled away as fucking clueless as he was before seeing it.

It's hard to tell which is worse.

But what is telling is that Charlie had a neat little quote from James Madison in his blog the following day:

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

-- James Madison to W.T Barry, August 4, 1822

which sums up the utter fuckupitude that this little newspaper article represents.

In our current civilization We the People are asked to make many decisions on issues we have no personal knowledge of, in places we have never visited, and with information perforce supplied by others.

And the only way we can arm ourselves with the power of knowledge on these issues, from wars to traffic law, is through the reportage of others.

But if this article does anything, it shows how a simple question of physical fact - one that could have been clarified with a single, simple question - can be rendered not just completely, utterly useless but actively misleading - "OMFG, there are rocket launchers out there on the streets of LA!!!!" - through the total incompetence and ignorance of one local reporter.

And this is to completely elide the pernicious influence of maliciously deliberate liars of the Glenn Beckian sort.

It remains in me, therefore, no real sense of wonder that we are so thoroughly fucked.

Update 5/24 p.m.: In the Comments section over at Milpub where this was cross-posted, Andy (one of our most reliable regulars here - the next round's on me, Andy...) does his usual thorough job of fact-finding and tracks this nonsense down further. He finds a photo of this fearsome weapon of mass destruction at the Bakersfield TV station site and notes that it is, as suspected, an inerted training aid - in this case, of a U.S. AT-4.

So, no, the streets of LA are not in danger of becoming Beirut or Ramadi, LA Times, as a few simple questions would have established.

Grrrrr.

Why, oh why, can we not have a better fricking media?!?

Die Wacht am Rhein

Apropos of U.S. military junketing, for all the minimal level of public discussion regarding the adventuring going on in places like Yemen and Libya, what I find even more fascinating is the utter lack of discussion regarding the fact that more than twenty years after the last mechanic stopped wrenching on the last T-80 assigned to the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany the U.S. still has something like 50,000 troops stationed in the kasernes they occupied when the Red Horde was poised to roll through the Fulda Gap.

Not advocating one way or the other - seriously; I really have no idea whether or not moving these troops or leaving them where they are would have an impact on either the defense budget or the policy of the U.S. - but IMO the complete indifference of any of the usual suspects here in the Land of the Free Because of the Brave to even mentioning the subject is an interesting non-comment on the state of the "public discussion" regarding What Should We Be Spending That Precious Tax Money On.

But perhaps the citizenry and "leadership" is deeply immersed in the important business of discussing what naughty ladies do with their lady parts to make unborn babies, and are thus distracted.

(n/t to Atrios, who brought this up)

Sunday to Monday: Random Runnings

The merely-gray Sunday promised us by our weather mystics (whose work, admittedly, is nastily complex in the autumn and spring around here - form does not hold in the Northwest between April and June and then again between October and early December) appears to have slid sideways into a drizzly and chilly morning. The small ones are mesmerized by something on the phosphorescent screen (called "Winx Club" and involving, I believe, fairies, though the title clubmembers appear indistinguishable from standard-issue television glamor girls so far as I can tell) and my bride appears to be stirring restlessly, though to what end I cannot tell.

I sat down here with the intent of writing some sort of post, but I have spent at least fifteen minutes just farkling about, so I am coming to the conclusion that an actual coherent post on a specific subject is not in me. All the same, I do feel the urge, like a chum salmon swimming through the barest purl of fresh water in the cold darkness of the Humbolt Current and feeling the neural spark of need to return to its natal freshet, to write something.

Sadly, the cool, sweet inspiration of blogging is not upon me.

Part of this is pure frustration. I cannot think of what earthly good I am doing talking about politics or military affairs. Based on the state of U.S. politics and foreign affairs we seem bound and determined to find a meatgrinder labelled "Return to the Gilded Age" and jam our collective (insert pendulous body part here, depending on your gender, dear reader...) into it. Better bloggers than I have pointed out the Madness of the Republic Party in insisting on a return to the social and economic paradigm of 1895, and the craven fecklessness of the other political party in refusing to shout "Fire" as the teabaggers set the social contract we have lived with since 1932 alight.

And the preceding post is a speaking example of my frustration with our supposed foreign policy. The U.S. 2012 is a de facto empire. A "soft" empire, but, still, we share a lot of similarities with the imperial Great Powers of history. So I think to just assume that we will NEVER intervene in places around the world where our "leaders" believe that U.S. interests demand or will benefit from military intervention is unrealistic.

But ISTM that our rationales for many of our more recent interventions has been increasingly iffy. Libya baffles me - what was the point there? Even a "successful" intervention, as it was organized, wasn't going to do anything but decapitate one side of a civil war. How we figured that would end well - when the OTHER side was a mixture of shambolic, vicious, and Islamic - completely eludes me.

I understand that there will always be mistakes - the government of the RVN probably looked no worse in 1965 than the government of Lebanon looked in 1958. But some situations are clearly impossible; look at 1983.

One the one hand you had a "perfect case"; Grenada was tiny, isolated, and weak. It was an irritant, no more, but an opportunity to remove that irritant with minimal cost, and it worked as planned.

On the other hand, Lebanon was clearly a mess; open intervention from untouchable foreign powers (Syria and Israel), an utterly incompetent "government", a multi-sided civil war that we were somehow going to "stabilize"...who the hell COULD have thought that was a good idea?

And ISTM that our recent run; A-stan, Iraq, and Libya - share a lot more with Lebanon than Grenada. Just seems like we've lost the ability to think coherently about how to parse these out, lately...and I have no idea how my writing anything more about this clusterfuck is actually "helping".

And here Sunday has drifted into Monday, and I'm still adrift. So I will turn to the last refuge of the outmatched blogger, the random free association. So.

My little girl had a birthday last month, remember?

Err, maybe not - I'm not sure I blogged it. Anyway, she did and is now a proudly grown-up six-year-old.

For her birthday several of her little girl friends gifted her with Barbies. Those Barbies, I am proud to say, have already been tossed into the lascivious tangle of naked Barbies heaped in the bath toy cistern. The Girl is frou-frou in some ways, but Barbies are not one of them.

Although this particular Barbie made me grin;

Oh, speaking of kiddos, I have been remiss in my update of KidVid tastes. The big news is that the Star Wars Era is now officially Over. We're done with all things Lucas. The latest faves are; My Little Pony - Friendship is Magic and The Legend of Korra.

Here's the most awesomest cool part about that, though; both of these are actually fun for adults, too. Yes, I'm admitting it; I likes me some ponies.

The thing is, these aren't your and my ponies. A freelance graphic artist named Lauren Faust reimagined the old Seventies ponies (that really WERE an awful, helium-and-cotton-candy-stuffed atrocity right up there with the other eye-gougingly-cute Seventies crap like the Smurfs^TM and Care Bears^TM) and came up with a witty, fast-thinking take on the earlier fucking disaster.

Her Ponies are still cute. But they're cute in a smart, funny way. Pinkie Pie is delightfully, completely, nuttily utterly random, Fluttershy is painfully shy but occasionally mad butch, Rainbow Dash is waaaaay too cool, Rarity is the complete Drama Queen, and the other two pals are there to be the ballast. They can make me laugh until I cry, and that's pretty damn rare for me outside Young Frankenstein and a handful of old beach movies.

And that's not even going into the fun that other people have with the New Ponies.

Ponies. Heh. Good stuff, and you can say I said so.

Now, Korra...

I think I mentioned the last time we talked about the kiddos' viddy stylings Avatar; The Last Airbender? Okay, well, Korra is by the same people who did the original Avatar. It's not in the same broad style. It's darker, more grown-up. There's (yuk!) kissing.

But outside those it's just as well-written and entertaining as the old Avatar. It's exciting without being vicious, gentle without being sappy. And the writers have already hooked me with their incredible cunning five minutes into the first episode; what the hell was the incredible story that happened to Zuko and Asula's mother!?!

And - just off the top of my head - who the hell thought it was such a good idea to make a movie, a ginormous, full-length feature film, of the forty-year-old board game Battleship?

I mean, really?

Speaking of awesomely shit movies, we caught another kaiju movie the other day; Godzilla vs. Megaguirus.

(Reeeeally bit, just for the record, and I say this as a lover of kaiju movies and the Big Green Guy in particular, although I can't not mention the incredible "kaiju ferachio" scene where the G puts this ninja move on the evil Megaguirus just as the big meanie is about to spear him with his protuberant tail-stinger and clomps down on Mega's poker-pecker and...well, let's just say I winced at the big finish. Yeeowch.)

But I can't just pass this one by without giving a shout-out to the leading lady, boss of the G-Graspers played by one 田中美里 (Tanaka Misato), and, specifically, her ears.

Because this gal has one frigging ginormous set of cranium fins. Seriously; this picture give you an idea but just doesn't do them justice. I shit you not, Ms. Tanaka has one prize-winning pair of earflaps.

Like sails, this girl's listening lugs. Worth the price of admission, if you ask me. Amazing ears. Really. Life of their own, those ears. That and kaiju ferachio, with biting.

Joe Bob says; check it out.

Speaking of women who can do amazing stuff, the trickster above is Patty McGee, a giant of the early skateboarders and the first woman to make national news for riding the asphalt waves. The website at the link has this brilliant telephone commercial (remember when landlines actually advertised?) with Patty skating through the house.)

I think what I like about the whole magilla is the homemade feel to everything, from the crude skateboards to the bare feet to the do-it-yourself story of how Patty pretty much invented her own craft.

The other interesting thing, to me, anyway, is how fragmented our culture has become since 1965. I mean, there are LOTS of skateboarders today; you see skateboards everywhere. But there's no broad impact on us, skateboarding, like so much else we do, is a subset of something and for some people - it's a little cul-de-sac of pop culture. By professionalizing and sleeking down and mainstreaming Patty's craft it seems a lot more...trivial. Does it, or is it just me? But I can't think of a skateboarder making the cover of People magazine or USA Today or getting his or her own commercial.

Hmmmm.

For some reason my hip has chosen to be vindictive today.

It always aches, at least a little, but that's pretty much a given when the ball-and-socket at the top of your right leg is fairly thoroughly rusted out. But some days it just seems to enjoy giving me a little extra kick in the ass.

And I mean that literally; my right quad, and hamstring, and gluteus, ache and burn like...well, like you'd think your leg muscles would feel when your bones decided to quit on you. And deep inside the little fucker roars and hammers and does its level best to make me sour and angry.

I think I'm starting to understand what chronic pain does to people. It's...difficult...to be happy and friendly when your ass is aching.

I learned as a kid, and have always believed, that difficulties and pain are to be endured, at best, with dignity and at least with silence. And, really, what good would a long whine of complaint do for me? There's nothing to be done, short of surgery, and that best left until this can not be endured a moment longer. And it's not to that point yet. The good days are decent and the bad days not unbearable.

But when the damn thing decides to be miserable it sure tends to make for a long, long day.

Mojo, too, has had a bit of a long day.

She's caught the griping cold that has been meandering through the kid's school, smacking a kid here and there and a parent or a teacher unwary enough to forget for a moment that elementary schools are the Industrial Age version of the pesthouse, full to bursting with pathogens of the rankest sort.

She managed in her usual undramatic way; fetching kiddos from school, entertaining, disciplining, feeding, and supervising the small ones until I got back from a long day at work. But then she pretty much folded, and was a wan shadow of her usual self until collapsing into bed.

You have to feel pretty tender towards a sleeper not to feel at the least, a trifle superior to them. Sleeping humans are not generally lovely objects. Movies lie; the most gorgeous woman and the studliest man are ridiculous in sleep; they snort, they twitch, their faces are slack and uninhabited, an open invitation for the waking being to feel a nasty little desire to tweak some part of them or play cruel tricks on them.

If we feel any sort of human empathy we feel no such pettiness in the presence of the Big Sleep of death. We are, most of us, silent, humbled, and belittled by the end of all things, the terminator of delights.

But sleep, the petty cousin of death, brings with it no such awe. A stranger sleeping is a hand waiting to be dunked in a pot of warm water, or a nose to be pinched, or at the very least a buzzing snorer to be afforded an irked glance.

But the sky changes when the sleeper is someone dear to you.

My little girl is a very neat sleeper. She is usually curled into a comma, her wild tousle of midnight hair at one end while the other is lost in the tangle of soft blankets she demands. She seldom stirs, and never, to my knowledge, makes noise.

The Boy, on the other hand, is a sprawl, all long arms and legs buried amid the mountain of stuffed animals that share his bed, or, rather, dominate it. He mutters and tosses, restless even asleep, his limbs moving in the slow locomotion of dreams.

My bride is neither graceful nor akimbo but, rather, like her waking self a very compact, purposeful sleeper. She has recently made a soft, plush throw for herself and is swallowed within moments of unconsciousness, a small bundle of warm blue velvet.

Tonight, though, her sleep is troubled; perhaps the effect of the cold medication, or perhaps some random uneasiness sparking the cold synapses inside her dreaming head. I sit with her for a moment, and speak quietly, and she settles quietly, whatever the trouble was receding, her breathing slowing and deepening.

For just a moment I sit beside her. All that is visible is the curve of her head, the perfect bowl of skull softened by her short dark hair, all scattered by her tossing and the shot-threads of gray shining in the light from the kitchen across the hallway. The faintest hint of jawline disappears into the welter of blankets and sheet below.

For that moment I'm seized by an enormous tenderness, a deep and passionate shiver of desire for her; not as a woman but as this woman, my wife of a decade and mother of our children, this woman sleeping next to me, her unruly shock of gray-black hair, her sharp nose and pale-fire eyes that are already beginning to look like her mother's at forty, her sure, short, slender fingers and skin like pale satin that tans poorly and burns like flash paper. With her touchy need for respect and the way she jumps and shrieks at sudden sounds, with her strength and her fears, her rough desires, her uncaring of the immediate and the transient, and her deep well of knowledge.

On the top of the blue plush blanket her hand twitches once and relaxes into the motionlessness of deep sleep, her fingers releasing the passing evening. As I turn to go she sighs, sinking into the smooth black river of night and drifting through the darkness towards tomorrow's daylight.

A Foreign Affair

According to the reportage of the New York Times, bombing and strafing Libya has, shockingly, failed to weed the garden of Liberty and let freedom reign.

All of this post-intervention militia-fueled chaos had, also shockingly, failed to make so much as a blip on the national geopolitical "discussion". The same people who advocated bombing the Gaddafi regime have been, shockingly, silent about the mess that followed or the very poor prospects for the former dictatorship to go anywhere but down into failed-statedom. Their adversaries - who were fine with bombing so long as it was in Iraq or Afghanistan - are likewise mute. Nobody seems to want to talk about this outside Libya and there, they're too busy shooting the place up to bother.

So we have, on the one side, the neocons and their coterie that advocated "more rubble, less trouble" as an excuse for ginning up a war in southwest Asia that turned a marginally pesky dictatorship into an all-but-Iranian ally and turbulent mess, have not been rebuked, are not repentent, and appear to have suffered no significant consequences for being oh-so-wrong.

And on the other, the liberal interventionists that argued that "helping" the Libyan rebels by flying overhead bombing and strafing their enemies was the functional equivalent of Treaty of Alliance of 1778 and, likewise, appear neither abashed nor upbraided for the mess they have, if not made, at least done little or nothing to solve and may have, in fact, contributed to.

All of this suggests that regardless of which faction rules in Washington the Washington Rules will continue to apply. The U.S. will continue to send its military into foreign disorders, rebellions, and civil wars.

So, as a private citizen I would ask; what should I hope for, at least, in a future foreign intervention to assist my country in spending it's treasure and (perhaps) it's blood wisely. If we're going to play the Game of Thrones, how and where should we play?

To think about how do this, let's look at the history of just major U.S. interventions since WW2 and see if we can find any common threads of success and failure - just the U.S. examples to keep it simple.

Here's the interventions I'd like to look at, starting in 1945. We won't count the occupations of Germany and Japan (though those were extremely successful interventions) as being, in effect, continuations of WW2.

Korea 1950-1953: Success (U.S. objective to deter capture of ROK by DPRK, attained and maintained at present)
Vietnam 1955-1975: Failure (U.S. objective to establish separate RVN not attained)
Lebanon 1958: Success (U.S. objective to back Lebanese government of President Camille Chamoun attained, status quo maintained for 18 years until civil war of 1975)
Dominican Republic 1965: Success (U.S. objective to "stabilize" DomRep post-Trujillo attained by "election" of caudillo President Joaquín Balaguer, 22 years of one-man rule)
El Salvador 1980-1992: Success (U.S. objective to bolster existing Salvadorian government attained, rebellion defeated)
Grenada 1983: Success (U.S. objective to remove remnants of New Jewel Movement and cut ties between Grenada and Cuba attained)
Lebanon 1983: Failure (U.S. objective of supporting the Lebanese government in the ongoing civil war not attained)
Panama 1989-1990: Success (U.S. objective to remove remnants of Torrijos regime and install U.S.-friendly government - recently led by, ironically, the son of Omar Torrijos!)
Kuwait 1991-1992: Success (U.S. objective of restoring territorial integrity of Kuwait attained)
Bosnia 1992-today: Success (U.S. objective of containing Serbia and stabilizing Bosnia/Croatia attained and maintained to present time)
Somalia 1992-1993: Failure (U.S. objective of stabilizing Somalia/Mogadishu not attained)
Kosovo 1999: Success (U.S. objective of functionally supporting Kosovar independence from Serbia attained)
Afghanistan 2002-today: Undetermined, initial Success, but probably long-term Failure (U.S. initial objective of dispersing Al Qaeda and AQ-friendly Taliban regime attained, long-term stability of successor Afghan government in doubt)
Iraq 2003-today: Undetermined, but largely Failure (U.S. initial objective of replacing Hussein regime with compliant pro-U.S. government only partially attained, long-term stability of successor Iraqi government in doubt)
Libya 2011: Undetermined, initial Success, possible, even probable long-term Failure (U.S. objective of removing Gaddafi dictatorship attained, long-term stability of successor regime in doubt)

Where are the successes, and what do they have in common?

Korea, Lebanon 1958, the Dom Rep, El Salvador, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, and the Balkans all had one or more of the following:

- a relatively stable society and economy, and, often, an extended period of of stability prior unrest and U.S. intervention (even if the stability was dictatorial, or transient; even the Balkans, chaotic as it was in 1992, had been quiescent under Tito showing that civil society was possible again after the shells stopped falling and the Croats and Bosnians were able to use the USAF as their air force to beat the Serbs. The exceptions to this I can think of - El Salvador and the Dom Rep - were not genuinely sound economies, being tilted strongly towards an elite governing class at the expense of the majority that provided one of the central causes of their rebellions. The former has made some land and economic reforms while the latter has not, but in both cases the underlying economic grievances weren't really "solved". Also in both cases it didn't matter - the strong central government and the army aided by U.S. largesse made continued rebellion untenable.)

- a coherent and functional local government for the U.S. to ally with (i.e. someone on the ground to seize and/or hold power once U.S. forces had completed their operations. In the case of Grenada this had to be more-or-less created, but the NJM had not scorched the earth and local politicians were in place to take over.)

The failures are also similar in lacking these elements;

South Vietnamese society was deeply divided between the Francophone/Catholic elites and the Buddhist/Vietnamese populace, and it's economy was similarly imbalanced. Lebanon was well on it's way to being a failed state by 1982, and Somalia was a failed state in 1992. The "economy" of Afghanistan appears to be a huge and largely unaddressed problem with the long-term stability of that mess, and in both Iraq and Libya we see the problems with a petroeconomy in a weak or failing state in that most if not all the benefits are typically hijacked by corrupt, kleptocratic elites.

The failures - especially Lebanon, Somalia, and Libya - are also typically pre-Westphalian (tribal or immediately post-tribal) societies. Strong tribal and sectarian divisions are present in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Similar problems were present in the Balkans, but I think a large part of the difference is that by the time of the U.S. intervention in 1992 an extended period of ethnic cleansing allowed rough homogeneity to coalesce into the Bosnian/Serbian/Croat territories once U.S. airpower helped defeat the irredentist Serbs. A similar process allowed a similar success in Kosovo, and has allowed what success has been attained in Iraq - the end of the insurgency owes as much to the fact that there are no more Shiite and Sunni enclaves for rival militias to make war on as it is the Baghdad government gaining control.

In terms of governments, well, Somalia and Libya just don't have any and never did after their respective dictators were overthrown. South Vietnam had a real problem in that it's government was largely the relict of the French colonial elite. Lebanon in '83 had no groups strong enough to securely hold political power until the Syrians intervened. We established a Shia-majority government in Baghdad but the country has effectively fragmented into a Kurdish mini-state in the north and a south whose relations with the Sunni minority are still problematic. Similarly, the Northern Alliance-based government of Afghanistan is troubled with internal divisions and fundamental kleptocratic dysfunction.

So what do I think should the take-home lesson for our future U.S. global policeman be?

Obviously, the initial calculation should be, as it always should be, is the gain worth the risk? Is there a benefit on the ground to be had from the commitment of U.S. lives, wealth, and political standing?

But, second, I would opine that there are two fundamental conditions to be assayed.

Is the locale fundamentally stable, is there a real, or at least potential, underlying social and political cohesion, and is there a competent local ally available NOW to work with?

If so, then the chances are that the problem really is some sort of transient issue, and that the application of force is capable of destroying divisive or chaotic factions - people and organizations - that are producing the instability and producing an outcome favorable to U.S. geopolics. And once those factions are attacked, the rebels killed or imprisoned, their organizations degraded or destroyed, the local ally is capable of imposing itself on the polity and continuing that favorable outcome at least in the medium-term.

This is likely to be ugly and brutal for the locals, but, remember; we're thinking not like human beings but like a Great Power here. What matters is "results", not human lives.

But...if those conditions are NOT present...

Then the only reason I can see for intervening is if the potential for continued local troubles has a high probability of causing larger, regional or global trouble for the U.S. in the short- or medium-term, or the effort involved will be utterly trivial, and the likely bad outcome will be likewise insignificant. The alternative is that any U.S. intervention will need to be a genuinely massive one; an occupation-of-Germany sort of thing. And even if we try that, as we did in Vietnam, the outcome is still pretty dicey if the local conditions are as poor as they are, say, in Somalia, Libya, Liberia, or the Congo.

So I'd argue that under this rubric the interventions in Lebanon 1983, Iraq, Somalia and Libya would probably not have happened, and the intervention in Afghanistan would have likely been confined to a punitive expedition in 2002. Or all the above would have been expanded to full-on post-WW2-style long-term occupations (and I'll carry your ruck from here to the Halls of Montezuma if you think the U.S. public would have gone all-in for that...).

Do I think this will happen?

No - as I said at the top; nobody who supported or supports the present system, the one that has produced this hit-or-miss pattern of interventions since 1990, has paid a political price for the lack of geopolitical rigor involved in picking our fights.

But...should it?

What is the appropriate process, and policy, for a Great Power - especially a supposedly-republican Great Power - to do in an increasingly multipolar world? How do you go about re-writing the Washington Rules?

Don't Fear The Reaper

The summer has finally arrived in Portland.

Now generally this is a Good Thing. For all that we made our bones being cold and rainy, we Stumptowners like the warm sun as much as anyone. We like trading our raingear for shorts and T-shirts, and our boots for flip-flops and topsiders. And especially this year, with the winter SO wet and lingering so long.

The only downside is that the grass then begins to grow.

And in the fertile valley at the end of the Oregon Trail, the bastard doesn't just grow. It metastasizes like a frigging green melanoma; a verdenoma that goes utterly bugnuts when the sun arrives to warm the rich soil and all that rain-soaked vegetation.

And this is what has happened to the little "Rain Garden" at my kids' elementary school. By last Saturday the grass was, in some places, two feet high.

Now that in itself is kind of sad.

First, take a look at the linked page to see what the big deal about this "Rain Garden" is. When we first moved here the courtyard between the wings of the school was this fugly asphalt rectangle; awash in the winter, baking in the early autumn and late spring, and just butt-ugly all year round.

The school district took about $100,000 and ripped out the asphalt and made the thing over into a garden designed to work in Portland's cool-wet-winter-hot-dry-summer climate.

The idea was that rather than a typical lawn (which, around here, would be dead grass and dandelions by August) the thing would contain "...trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers selected for their tolerance to dry and moist soil conditions."

Here's a picture of what it looked like when it was finished.

And here is was Saturday afternoon:

The first couple of years a group of parents who were involved in the construction continued to look after the Garden; weeding, watering in the summer (since despite what the brochure says the "hand pump" was never installed and the cistern was used as a compost bin, so the watering required City water), raking leaves in the fall.

But after their kids moved on to middle and high school that group fell away. Last Saturday there were four adults there to try and attack the mess; Mojo, and myself, and two other moms.

And it IS a mess.

Three years without attention and rough field grass have overtaken the native plants almost everywhere. Weeds - especially our hated Himalayan blackberry - have grown up in the planters. The mound at the west end - what I call "Hamburger Hill" - is covered in knee-high grass that makes walking or sitting on it a chore.

Because of the uninhabitable condition the teachers have stopped using the Garden completely. Mojo did a quick survey two weeks ago; not a single teacher was interested or willing to use the Garden in its existing condition.

For all practical purposes, over one hundred thousand dollars and hundreds, probably thousands, of parent, teacher, and donated contractor work-hours are, at present, utterly wasted.

My bride, lovely woman that she is, has taken an interest in this patch of weeds. She, and two of Missy's kindergarten pals moms, hauled me and the kiddos over on Saturday and began to hack away at the rampaging sea of grass with hand tools and a tiny residential trimmer.

I could have sat down and cried.

First, because there are something like 500 kids at Astor Elementary school. Assuming that half of them have two involved parents the potential labor pool runs to about 750 adults. And yet here were four people giving their time to try and rescue this expensive, wasted space. We were not just the 1 Percent; we were the 0.53 Percent. Of the some 750 parents with children at that school no more than four - and two of those parents of the same kids - could find time on a weekend to pitch in to gift that school some of their time and labor.

And, second, because much as I admired the gals' intentions, I couldn't believe their methods. Faced with a weedy Hannibal running wild they were trying to beat him by picking off one Carthaginian at a time with a boot knife.

Well. Sod THAT for a game of soldiers. The Army didn't teach me tactics and logistics for me to pull grass one clump at a time.

I told them flat-out that I had no intention of squatting on my hams like Luke the Gook pulling one clump of grass at a time.

And than I drove up to Columbia Boulevard and rented a big-ass gas-powered weed whacker, returned that afternoon and waded into the grass with my wailing scythe and reaped the damn stuff like Alaric.

So now Hamburger Hill is mown as level as a fairway, and the remainder of the Garden is flat as a putting green.

Until the next time.

Because there is still nobody at Astor in charge of the place. There is nobody to coordinate, implore, cajole, and direct volunteers, like me, to continue to maintain the place. There is nobody to coax teachers into using it, or children to visit it.

So while it has been reaped, there is still nothing in place to sow the future of this once-lovely little Garden. Instead it lies fallow, slowly deteriorating under the warm early summer sun.

And I put it to you that the story of the Reaper in the Rain Garden is one of America, circa 2012, writ small.

Begun with great publicity, on grant money and borrowed labor, and then thrown away through a combination of inattention, mismanagement, carelessness, and indifference. What might be a pretty little place for learning gone to waste for the lack of people who care enough to get off their dead asses and do some work for the common good, and "leadership" that would rather preen and posture than get down and do the hard work of getting those dumb bastards to understand that if we don't hang together we will surely, at the pleasure of our corporate masters, hang separately.

And while today our work on the Garden has reclaimed it, for the moment...

...the patient grass grows tall again as you read this. And we are still without a plan.

Parthenogensis

Yes, Proctor & Gamble is one of the Lesser Satans. Yes, the Olympics has become a loathsome concatenation of greed and cupidity. Yes, advertising in general is the Devil's Siren Song.That said, every so often the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, say something very touching. And this is one of those times.

You don't have to have a child hoping to be an Olympic athlete to appreciate the little fable recounted here. Just think of your own mother or father and the lifetime you and they have spent building. Or your own son or daughter.

I think the best description of the entire business of taking an embryo and producing a man or a woman I've ever read comes from a very sad little science fiction story called Aftermaths by Lois McMaster Bujold. The setting is what amounts to a graves registration party recovering the bodies of those killed in a naval engagement in deep space. The speaker is laying out the body of a young enemy soldier that her assistant has reviled as "garbage".

"Not at all" said the medtech. "Think of all the work he represents on somebody's part. Nine months of pregnancy, childbirth, two years of diapering, and that's just the beginning. Tens of thousands of meals, thousands of bedtime stories, years of school. Dozens of teachers. And all that military training, too. A lot of people went into the making of him."

She smoothed a strand of the corpse's hair into place.

"That head held a universe, once. He had a good rank for his age."

I think you know of our struggles with children and parenting. I have no idea of yours, but I do know that there is no such thing as "easy". So on this ridiculous corporate fiction "Mother's Day" let me just say that there is a virtue in doing the right things, even if they are done in a parlous way, in a difficult place, for the wrong reasons and for no better excuse than hope and desperation. The grace is in the doing, and not in the hope of reward.