Down Among the Dead Men

So on Memorial Day I ended up in the old Civil War cemetery at Poplar Grove.

It's peaceful and pretty and very manicured, very much in the tradition of the more modern military cemeteries, a sort of pocket-Arlington.

Until you look at the rows of stones, and realize that way more than half of them aren't "headstones" at all but simply stone blocks with a number carved on them.

These were the remnants of soldiers that lacked any sort of identity; nothing marked their original grave - or, it it had, was gone by the time the graves registration parties reached it - and nothing was left, if there had been anything, of a tag or scrap of paper with a name on it.

There was just some bone, and scraps of cloth, and probably some less savory remnants, to be gathered up and put back in a hole with a stone with a number on it for the following hundred-plus years. An empty chair at a table, an empty peg on a wall where no coat was hung, an empty house to which the scraps of bone and cloth never returned.

Perhaps even more grim were the separate files where the men of the U.S. Colored Troops were buried, still put apart from the white soldiers, still separate and unequal in death as in life.

All in all a very unsettling sort of day, one that raised more spectres than laid them.

Forgiveness of the Dead

On this day, 64 years ago, Americans gathered at the cemetery at Nettuno, near what had been the terrible charnel-house beachhead of Anzio, to dedicate what would become the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and to "honor" those killed in the war that had just ended.

You know how I loathe all the flag-waving, pontificating, self-justifying “memorial” dog-and-pony shows that serve only to make the living feel better about themselves and their willingness – or, worse, eagerness – to cheer on others to die for their country if it wasn’t for those dang bone spurs.

The closest to fitting "memorial day" act I’ve ever read of was LTG Truscott’s address that day.

Truscott had commanded the VI Corps at Anzio, and a lot of the dead guys there were from his outfits. And he was a hard man, known to be kind of salty, and was probably more sick of hearing the pious patriotic platitudes than I am.

So when the opening caprioling was done he looked out over the rows of “dignitaries” and reporters and guests, turned, and faced the rows of silent markers behind the rostrum.

Nobody knows exactly what he said – probably because there was either no plan to record his words or because he couldn’t be heard – but based on Bill Mauldin's account the gist was that Truscott didn’t see how there was anything particularly good or heroic about getting killed in your teens or 20s or 30s, and that while generals and politicians would tell you that all your dying was noble and sacrificial that most generals, anyway, kinda suspected that was pretty much bullshit.

He agreed that lots of them had died because somebody, maybe he, had fucked up and if that had happened he was grievously sorry and apologized to them. That he knew that was a big ask, but that he owed it to them to ask their forgiveness anyway.

And that he promised that if, in the coming years, he ever ran into anyone tubthumping a line of guff about the glory of war and heroic death that he, Truscott, would tighten the joker's shot group damn quick smart.

So as far as I’m concerned it'd be great if every damn politician and talking head can stay the hell away and leave those haunted graves to the grass, and the sky, and the dead, and those who knew and loved and lost them.

They won't, because that's not how we do "Memorial Day". But I wish they would.

But I will be in that cemetery today, sharing a drink with my Army brothers. I hope you will, too.

And, as always today, this.

Summer Rain

No, it's not summer, and no, it's not raining. I just found this over at Lance Mannion's place and liked it so much I had to repost it.

I woke past midnight
to the slightly burnt orange odor
of soft summer rain.
My wife slept beside me,
her breath punctuated with
the little sighs of a dreamer. Outside, pale moonlight
shone through the clouds, the great
evergreens dripping.

the katsura at the far end
of the garden turning
bright yellow already, although
it was early August.
I made a cup of tea and went
out to stand on the deck. I've clung to this place
like Han Shan-tzu
clung to his cave near the temple

on his beloved mountain.
I've watched these trees reclaim
a chunk of forest---slash,
waste and underbrush
when I came here
thirty years ago. No place is special
except we make it so
through myth and habitude. The forest reclaims itself
as best it can. Can I
do less? "No road leads the way,"
Kotaro duly noted his echo
of Han Shan's echo of Lao Tzu,
and hundreds of years between. I love beyond words this quiet rain
in these trees, the rose
whose stark white blossom lasts only a day, this garden
in moonlight, and the woman
who sighs, worried in her dreams. about her sleepless paramour
who rises in the night
to smell the rain.

---“Summer Rain” by Sam Hamill, collected in “Almost Paradise: New Poems & Translations”

May have to do with that I'm a long way from home at work, and am thinking of my loves and my home. But more about that later.

Somebody's smoking Hemp for Victory

THIS stuff is what drives me nuts about the current American pash for tongue-bathing soldiers.

When speaking of the Americans who are going to take it in the shorts because of the trade wars with the PRC that are fun and easy to win Senator Tom Cotton (R - Arkansas) consoled them that:

"There will be some sacrifices on the part of Americans, I grant you that, but I also would say that sacrifice is pretty minimal compared to the sacrifices that our soldiers make overseas that are fallen heroes that are laid to rest in Arlington make."

Except those farmers and manufacturers and Sears customers getting hit with these costs didn't ask to be dragged into a pissing contest with the PRC over Fitbit parts any more than those GIs asked to be walking the streets of Kabul trying to remake Afghanistan into Belgium.

To equate these trade wars with the "blood of heroes"?

It's despicable on it's face, but, worse, it makes taking issue with the trade wars to a level of Dolchstoß comparable to betraying the Noble Soldiers. It's a version of Godwin's Law, a rhetorical trick designed to put a stop to debate.

Worse, it's deeply dishonest, if for no other reason than those "fallen heroes" didn't "fall" as "sacrifices" in a war declared by the People in Congress, or to any sort of existential threat to the United States, or, for that matter, for any sort overarching national interest, but in a bog-standard squalid little imperial expedition in the global hustings that has been ginned up largely by lies, misdirection, fear, and pants-pissing panic.

I love my Army brothers, but the guys holding down a slot in Asia or Africa today aren't holding back global fascism, or facing the might of a hostile superpower. They're doing the dirty business of empire. If my country wants them to do that business that's one thing. But if Tom Cotton - or my country - wants to drag me and every other American into a trade war in Asia and justify it by comparing it to that service?

He and it need to come to me first and make a case for that trade war and that service, not simply assume that they're worth blood and/or treasure and demand I respect that because some poor bastards are getting hosed wasting a year-and-a-half in fucking Helmand Province playing whack-a-muj.

Because if you gave me the choice between:

1) "Sacrificing" in a boneheaded trade war with China because I "support the troops", or
2) Skipping the trade war AND ending the expeditionary wars in Asia and Africa and bringing those troopers home?

I'd go with Door #2.

It'd be bad enough if We the People really were Army-mad, but in a nation where barely anyone bothers to give up a couple of years to the tree suit it REALLY drives me nuts when I run across this faux-militarism stuff.

Happy Day, you Mothers

Funny how it never really occurred to me until afterwards.

But you were always there for us, even when we - well, I - were rotten little bastards. You loved us, cared for us, corrected us when we were wrong and praised us when we did right.

You were a classic Fifties corporate wife and mother, but at the same time you were your own self; amateur actress, teacher, social liberal, mentor, confidant. Cubs fan - my childhood summers will forever be narrated by the sound of Jack Brickhouse drifting out of the big windows on the sunporch where you knit and listened and cursed the Amazin' Mets.

You did all that a worthy person does; you lived an upright and honorable life, you raised your children to do and be the best they could do and be, and you died full of years and honor.

I love and miss you, mom.

Margot Carol McMillan Lawes, 1926-2018

Experimenting with the end of the American Experiment

In 1932 Mr. Justice Brandis wrote: "...(a)state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."

Today I put to you that if it is, indeed, a laboratory, the State of Oregon is in the process of becoming Dr. Mengele's lab.

The experiment on trial at the moment is to see just how close to death the news media and the Oregon GOP can bring the notion of a "democratic republic".

Let's start here; the Republican Party has made itself widely detested in Oregon.

We are, in large part, what popular culture says we are; a bunch of plaid-shirted, granola-addicted hippies. But in an even larger part we are what I saw back in the Eighties when I was posted abroad; we are Panama.

Just like República de Panamá, Oregon is effectively two separate states.

There's the city - Portland - that is predominantly liberal and Democratic. And the "country", the rural areas outside the metro area, which are largely "conservative" and Republican. Yes, there are some blue islands - smaller cities like Eugene, Salem, and Bend - but the demographic hasn't really budged since I moved here nearly thirty years ago. Slightly more than half of Oregon lives within a thirty-minute drive of downtown Portland, and we vote Left (or left-ish). We broke for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary in 2016, and Hillary in the general.

The remainder lives in the hustings and votes Trump.

And, make no mistake - the Oregon GOP was Trump before Trump was Trump. We had a long period where the proto-teabaggers ate away the GOP's brain from the inside. We had tax revolters and Christopaths and ammosexuals that became the animating force of the Oregon GOP and were, as such, so utterly neofeudal and theocratic and insane with the sort of guns-God-gays cult insanity that now rules the national GOP that they turned the stomach of most of the rest of Oregon outside the real cows-outnumber-the-people yick-a-hoo rural fiefdoms. Oregon has become a deep-blue-purple state not so much because Oregonians are commies, but because the "conservatives" here became red-meat, right-wing whackaloons along with the rest of their Party, and the folks who hadn't drunk the Kool-ade were horrified and repelled.

To the point where the GOP is now a pathetic appendix in the Oregon House and a minority in the Senate.

This is the direct result, let me reiterate not of some sort of weed-induced liberal coup, but of the Oregon GOP's utter batshit teabaggery. The Republicans here have stood for things that even fairly "moderate conservatives" couldn't stomach. They've gutted the tax system and starved the schools. They've let the roads and pipelines go to hell. They've completely resisted even the most mild and sensible firearm regulation. They've tried again and again - since we have the "ballot measure" direct democracy system - to push the queers back in the closet and the rule of law on women's wombs.

They're bog-standard deplorable Trumpkins, in other words.

Here's a perfect example; this is a sample of what's on the Oregon legislature docket for this session:

House Bill 3427, a taxation measure that would fund education through imposition of a "corporate activity tax".
House Bill 2007, which would establish deadlines for cleaner trucks and require large state public construction projects to use vehicles with cleaner engines.
House Bill 2016, a pro-labor bill that would block public access to public employees’ information and lock many requirements that are currently negotiated during collective bargaining into state law.
House Bill 2020, a far-reaching cap and trade plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon.
House Bill 3063, which passed the House on Monday and would eliminate loopholes in Oregon’s vaccination mandate.
Senate Bill 750, which Republicans described in their document as the “bounty hunter bill.” It would authorize lawyers to enforce public contracting, minimum wage and other labor laws that currently only state labor regulators and the Department of Justice can enforce, according to a state document.
Senate Bill 978, a package of gun law changes including penalties for some gun owners who fail to lock up their weapons and a provision to allow gun dealers to refuse to sell guns to people younger than 21.
House Bill 2014, which passed the House earlier this year and would lift the cap on damages juries can award for so-called “pain and suffering.”

None of these are particularly looney-left, and several of them - in particular HB3427, HB2007, HB3062, and SB978 - are favored, and favors strongly, by anywhere between a bare majority to a supermajority of Oegonians.

In a functioning republic the legislature would debate these issues but the majority would rule. The whole IDEA of a republic is that the government acts on the citizen's convictions as expressed through the ballot box.

The Oregon GOP could "debate" - but would lose - on these measures because, well, their convictions have been such an anathema to the citizens that their place in government has been reduced to a cipher.

Because a majority of the people of Oregon ain't buying what the GOP was and is selling.

The Republicans' solution?

They've run away.

Seriously.

The GOP legislators have fled the state and effectively stopped the legislature's business by denying the Senate a quorum.

Now...this isn't just a GOP thing. When the Republicans controlled the legislature (which they did until about a decade ago) the Democrats did something similar when the GOP introduced something fairly draconian - IIRC it was an abortion-restriction bill - and forced the GOP to back off.

The difference here is that Oregon in general doesn't give a shit about abortion. Anti-abortion ballot measures have died by big losses every time the bible-bangers have gotten them on the ballot.

This is the Oregon GOP seeing the "will of the people" and telling The People; "Fuck you!"

And what does our Oregon paper of record do about this?

Does the front page of the Oregonian's online newspaper open with the screaming banner headline: "Oregon GOP STILL thwarting the People's Will!!!"?

Ummm...no.

You wanna know about "warding off depression" by drinking coffee? Which of your favorite TV shows got cancelled? "Why moms rank as our No. 1 heroes, while dads come in distant second.", or how somebody fucking shot a fucking dog in fucking SE Portland? The Oregonian is your go-to news site.

You wanna know how your political will is getting fucked by Oregon's Republican minority?

You gotta hunt through the below-the-fold "politics" section, and do it yourself. If you're a "low-information" (i.e. about 85% of the public) voter? You're either gonna give up long before that or not even start.

This - this - is how you take a republic into that laboratory...and inject it with a whomping dose of poison, and fucking kill it.

You ensure that a small group of cult dead-enders place their own fanaticism above the public weal. You ensure that the "news media" either doesn't report it at all, or, when it does, "both-sides" the shit out of it so Joe and Mary Lunchpail can't tell that it's one side that's shooting the hostage. And then you wait, while the bulk of the public doesn't understand why the things they think that a good government is supposed to do - like keep the schools open and keep nutters away from firearms and regulate dangers like dirty air and filthy water - don't get done.

And, eventually, the People give up on government, and either don't care, or openly welcome the Man on Horseback that comes promising that the trains will run on time.

While all eyes are drawn to the freak show in the White House, out here in Oregon we're giving you an experiment. An experiment in terror, frankly, that shows how easy it is to kill a republic.

Nearly 150 years before Justice Brandis concluded that the states would provide lab rats for the American Experiment another pretty well-known public figure observed that the important thing about republics wasn't getting them, but keeping them.

That's not looking particularly good out here in the great Northwest.