Red Rock Country

My friend Maia has a post up about her family's recent trip to the red rock country of Colorado around Moab. Which reminded me of the time I spent there back in the Nineties. My ex-wife and I went on a Sierra Club "service trip" which involved working as volunteers for the National Park Service. In our case, removing and rebuilding fence along "Dry and Rocky Mesa" in Arches National Park.

In case you were wondering, the guy on the left is me. I loved that old desert night parka. Wish I knew what the hell had happened to it. I wish I knew what the hell had happened to that cocky young guy, too. Well, I know what happened; just wish I'd treated his body a hell of a lot better when it worked like it did when he looked like that.

Anyway, Arches N.P. was a hell of a beautiful place, and I'll have to post about my time there. For now how about just a savor of the dry and rocky silence of the redrock desert on a chilly, raw Northwest day?

Small World: Super Secret Spy Edition

Unearthed an odd bit of buried past the other day.

It started with one of those gawdawful Facebook "memes". Even ran into one of them? Blogging tends to get them, though I haven't run across one for ages.

This one was about "how you met me", and it was mildly entertaining hear from old friends and see who remembered how who met whom all those years ago.

But in the process a name came up; a person I knew many years ago and was slightly friendly with in a very passant sort of way.

Her name is Susan Leslie Ireland, and she was just appointed the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis. As such she is "...responsible for the receipt, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence related to the Department's mission to safeguard the international financial system from abuse and to combat threats to U.S. national security."

And I knew her when. Howboutthat?

Anyway, the interesting thing is that when we were in college together I remember her as a painfully serious, intelligent, darkly pretty young woman. She roomed in a group with a clutch of other very bright and clever women, many of whom acted in our college Green Room and, as you might expect, caprioled joyfully with the sort of creative lunacy that has characterized thespians since Aristophanes' time.

Sue - as she was known in those days - was not quite of the same metal as her sisters; "forlorn" is how one of my contemporaries remembers her. She never seemed as...vivid...as her hallmates. And she seems to have had a very fraught relation with them; another former classmate of mine recalls her saying, within earshot of those long-time rooming hall associates and companions "Those people are not my friends..."; a remark almost as sad as it was tactless.I will admit to crushing on her a bit, back in those times; even callow and stupid I had a bit of a thing for seriously smart Dark Ladies. And she was - and is, it seems - very smart. And, as her picture testifies, still Dark and serious.

But I was too immature, and she too otherwise-engaged, and so we drifted away.

But after her name suddenly returning to my attention what I recalled vividly was that several years after graduation we met for a lunch.

She was already working in D.C. in a covert position - I believe probably with the National Security Agency - and I was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, a line medic for the 1/505th Infantry. I was headed north on a brief leave, called her up, and we made the time to meet at some indifferent lunch place somewhere in Georgetown.

She was still dark, still handsome, and very excited about her work. I was less hairy - still callow, but leaner, and harder - and gaining in both worldly and emotional maturity. So there we were; the young spy and the young paratrooper, sitting chatting on a bright sunny spring morning while a Reagan morning broke across America.We talked of ourselves, and the world's wagging. We discussed parachuting, which it seems that she had to learn as part of her own "basic training" in intelligence - it seems that even in the Eighties U.S. spies still hung on to bit of their OSS heritage. We talked about old friends, and future plans.

There was absolutely not a flint's worth of spark between us.

We enjoyed a pleasant spring day and parted with the usual promises to keep in touch and, as usual, failed to keep them. I went on to become a paratroop sergeant, and then, in succession, a graduate student and husband, a professional geologist, teacher, senior NCO, husband (again) and father.

Sue - or, rather, S. Leslie, as she prefers to be known - continued to find her way through the Hall of Mirrors; "Executive Assistant to the Director and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and in various analytical and management portfolios at CIA related to the Middle East and weapons of mass destruction....also detailed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense as Country Director for Iran and Kuwait." She also served as the "Iran Mission Manager" for the Director of National Intelligence.

It's strange to think of my old acquaintance as a Power herself; one of the Thrones and Dominations, a Beltway Insider, making reality, as the Bushies were wont to say, with the force of her knowledge, her judgement - one hopes - and her wiles at the subtle and deadly bureaucratic infighting in the halls of the great and the mighty.

But there she is, and, what's more, one of the "Iran Hands"; one of the fonts of intelligence wisdom on that contentious and troubled land.

And now, I wonder; what secrets is she telling to those seats of power?

Because had my life gone in other directions I might be one of those whose fate depended on that tall and serious Dark Lady. On what she said, and what she did not say, to those whose decrees sway the wide world.

To those whose words move armies and fleets, and who might well have sent First Sergeant Lawes plummeting out into the night sky over Qom, on the advice of the sloe-eyed young woman who thirty years ago sat across the cheap formica table from the young sergeant who was him, on that sunny spring Georgetown day, those fine eyes glowing as she described how much she had enjoyed the adventure of her brief "combat training" at Quantico, and the fearsome power she felt as the machinegun lept and thundered in her hands.And I wonder.

What will she say?

The Army I Knew: Light Sleeper

One thing I forgot to mention in the previous post about AIT and jump school; sleeping on the floor and burning paste wax. Both were peculiarities I encountered at Ft. Benning for the first time. They tended to reappear any time I went to an Army school, but Benning was the first.

The former was a simple expedient to having too much to do in too little time.

We learned very quickly that we were expected to keep our barracks to an IG inspection standard daily, from the uniforms on the hangers to the items in the drawers to the tightness of the bunk. Anything less meant returning from the day's training to find a nightmarish disaster that had to be repaired by the next morning.

One thing we quickly learned was that beds don't HAVE to be for sleeping. And that a tightly-made rack could easily be used as a static display whilst the exhausted GI managed to camp out on the floor using his sleeping pad and poncho liner. I don't think I spent a single night in my jump school rack until the night after the final jump. I dusted the blankets and tightened the corners, but that was all.

Let me tell you this, though; linoleum is fucking cold, and don't let anyone tell you different.

The other requirement was perfectly - and I mean perfectly - glass-like linoleum floors.

First of all, nobody - nobody who valued their lives - wore their boots into the barracks. Like little Japanese schoolboys, we took off our shoes at the door.

But the true, genuine, mirror-bright shine was only possible through the workings of modern technology which, in this case, meant Johnson's Paste Wax^TM, an electric buffer, and very small private, and a selection of terrycloth towels.

Here's how it worked.

First, you set fire to the can of paste wax; this was easy to do but hard to control - the trick was to make a sort of field-expedient handle out of a wire hanger and not mind the second-degree burns you got out of the sloshing, boiling-hot liquid wax.

You poured this liquid onto the floor and then, with a miniscule troop perched on it and a folded terry towel under it, ran the buffer over and over the waxy floor.

The effect was magical. Decades-old linoleum gleamed like jewels. I remember being mesmerized by the pure military poetry of it. Mind you, it could do nothing to close with and destroy the enemy, heal wounds, defend borders, succor allies, or defeat the enemies of my country. But it sure was pretty.

I also remember vividly one of the student leaders doling out this piece of advice regarding the floors; "You-all will want to remove your footgear before walking on my floor, because whoever fucks up my floor will be fucked up in reciprocity."

Indeed.

Tales from the Trail 1: The Mad Shitter

Fort Leonard Wood was fucking cold.

We were there in November, and I was told by the Leonard Wood cognoscenti that FLWM had two seasons; summer, and fucking cold. And at the moment it was fucking cold, and so was I.

But a drill sergeant is expected to be as impervious to cold as he or she is supposed to be immune to fatigue, fear, and uncertainty. Whatever else a trainee soldier may see during his or her Basic, they are not supposed to see a drill sergeant acting tired, afraid, or confused.

Or cold.

So I stood outside the nice, warm instructor's hut out in the middle of the scraggly woods on Range 37 and tried to look warm.

I was detailed as the company dogsbody that day; driver, runner, assistant Senior Drill; whatever was needed, that was what I was. But that morning the company commander had his own priorities, and they had nothing to do with my assigned duties.

"Sergeant Lawes," CPT Crowne asked sotto voce, "where, right now, at this very moment, is the Shitter?"

Now a normal, sane human being, hearing that, would have pointed the officer in the general direction of the latrines over by the woodline to the southwest. But a normal, sane human being would not understood that that term, at that particular time and place, had nothing to do with a place. It was a person.

PVT Flux wanted to be a soldier more than he wanted anything in the world.

Other eighteen-year-olds wanted a muscle car. Or a ridiculously awesome gaming system. Or to get inside the scented panties wrapped around the taut haunches of Suzy Creemcheese, Prairie Homecoming Queen and pride of West Lynn.

Not Joey Flux. He wanted a Combat Infantryman's Badge with two stars.

So he threw his gawky, badly-formed body at Basic Training like a spastic berserker, punishing himself and the equipment he fought to overcome. He was awkward at drill, slow and uncoordinated at PT, painfully incapable of the simplest military tasks.

But, oh, how he wanted to be a soldier. If desire, will and love alone could have been the masters Joey Flux would have been fucking Audie Murphy.

But mere military incapacity was not the impediment; this was the volunteer Army, and the numbers had to pass muster if even the slowest recruit had to be pencil-whipped on to their units. Let the gaining units chapter the poor bastard out, was the general opinion; they had nothing better to do. Here at BCT, Ft. Leonard Wood Missouri, we were in the business of making shit into soldiers and, by God, soldiers or one sort or another they would be.

But not in this case.

In this case, it WAS the shit that was the problem.

Because, you see, PVT Flux had problems beyond his ineptitude at D&C, general subjects, and PT.

He had an incurable inability to control his bowels around authority.

I'm not talking about a fear of truly Olympian power; a lurking dread of having his heels locked by the Chief of the Army Staff or the Post Commander. Merely being addressed sharply by SP4 Joremy, the orderly room clerk, would put Flux in a state of immediate knee-knocking terror. And if he was addressed by someone as exalted and terrifying as a drill sergeant he would nearly faint with panic.

For PVT Flux officers were pure, blind, sphincter-loosening nightmare.

The first time he demonstrated his peculiar affliction was when he was stopped by one of the cadre lieutenants while scurrying into a classroom early in cycle. He apparently hoped to avoid the august notice of this lesser god by lowering his head and speeding up to double-time, but he had made the mistake of passing alone and the officer must have been bored, or feeling shirty, because he halted Flux to harass him for not saluting.

I was told that the second john mistook Flux's look of panic for military intensity, and so stood awaiting the required gesture of respect which was, indeed, rendered with trembling hand. But it was accompanied by a sound not unlike the sudden tearing of rotten burlap, and both young soldiers were enveloped in a choking miasma of used chili mac and assorted secondhand GI chow.

The 2LT recoiled in loathing, and Flux's drill sergeant descended on him with fire and brimstone. This, needless to say, didn't help. The poor youth, having voided everything he could, merely subsided in a heap and had to be helped into the squad bay and hosed down in the shower.

Well, things went to hell after that. The wretched kid was beyond embarrassed, his superiors were roughly equally divided into horrified, disgusted, or amused. They tried, I'm told, everything they could think of. But the poor guy just pooped everytime he caught a glint of rank. He was hopeless.

By the time my USAR unit arrived to shepherd the young men of A/3/10 through two weeks of Basic Rifle Marksmanship poor Flux had experienced several more of these incidents, had been referred to Community Mental Health, and had been assessed unfit for service. It wasn't for lack of trying; I spoke gently to the poor kid, and he really, REALLY wanted to go on. It wasn't in his mind but in his bowels that the fear of military authority was so terrifying.

It was pure hindbrain - the caveman instinct when the sabertooth was on the slope above the trail, the direwolf glaring from the cleft of the rock. At the moment he was confronted by the menace of rank his monkey brain simply took over, and his monkey ass provided him with something to throw, perhaps. Or made him too noisome to be worth predating. Or something.

I really have no idea.

But the other victim of this sad little psychological drama was my commander. I'm not sure to this day if it started with CPT Crowne's predecessor but I've always suspected that this hearty sportsman, bursting with corn-fed Midwestern brio, took one look at the weedy little man who showed up to replace him and proceeded to take the mickey out of my boss with stories of the Mad Shitter and his insane desire to defecate on every officer of the United States Army.

From what I could tell from that moment, in the mind of CPT Crowne, PVT Flux occupied the same place that the hashishin of Alamut came to represent in the minds of 12th Century Crusaders, or the kamikazi in the estimation of the sailors of the U.S. Pacific Fleet; a frightful nightmare, the walking embodiment of sudden and unexpected horror.

My commander apparently pictured this poor wretch as some sort of walking bomb packed with deadly feces and fuzed to explode at the merest sight of an insignia of commissioned rank. That he was trapped in a BCT company with a home-grown Sunni suicide shit-bomb. CPT Crowne seemed to believe that the Mad Shitter lurked in ambush in every billet room or behind every blind corner of every training area, awaiting the opportunity to turn his back and hew down a selflessly-serving Reserve officer (married! with children! a churchgoer! Republican!) with his fearsome anal Claymore.

This dreadful fate so consumed his imagination that by the fourth day of our rotation the man was utterly useless and remained so the entire cycle. When he wasn't funking about looking for the Mad Shitter he was worrying about where poor Flux was and coming up with schemes to remove one or the other of them from each other's proximity, and that's what he was worrying about at the moment instead of the cold.

"Sergeant Lawes, here's what you need to do." he hissed, his eyes darting about like a ferret's in a cage, "You need to find the Shitter, and you need to take him back to the company area. Now."

I looked at the poor sod with as much pity as I could muster beyond my own chill. This is what the hell the Army has come to. Bill Calley and now this. Christ on a fucking pogo stick.

"Well, actually, sir, I need to remain with the trainees. The CUCV is the designated evacuation vehicle in case of an injury, you may recall."

CPT Crowne glared at me, his slitted lids almost hiding the panic in his mustelid eyes.

"All right, sergeant, if you're going to be that way. Inform Senior Drill that my CP will be in the cadre office until the trainees return to their bivouac site."

Yeah, the only place on the entire range where young PVT Flux can't go, you poor weasel, I thought, but gave him my best SFC Nelson salute, holding it until he turned and scampered away.

Poor Flux. He was still there, on medical hold awaiting his release from Active Duty on a Chapter 11 (Unsuitable to the Needs of the Army), when my two-week rotation ended and I got on the bus headed back to Portland.

I never found out what became of the Terror of the Tenth Infantry, the scourge of the shoulder insignia, the briefly notorious trainee soldier known to legend simply as the Mad Shitter.

The Army I Knew: BCT

We left off here almost exactly one year ago, with the cadre of A Company, 4th Battalion, 3rd (Basic Training) Brigade descending on the poor fools - among which I was one of the relatively-average-foolish - arriving from Ft. Dix Reception Station.

Basic Training - at least, the Basic Training they were running at Ft. Dix in the Eighties, was almost exactly what you would expect if you've seen a handful of movies or television shows or talked to someone who had been through it. It relies on the gullibility and fearfulness of late-teenagers and early adults who can be frightened into doing exactly what they are told. A handful are too stubborn, or too broken, to do even this, and they are, usually, quickly disposed of - although one day I'll tell you the story of Ft. Benning and the Mad Shitter.

But the rest is a tale as old as the Army and not really worth repeating. Yes, they made us do pushups. Yes, we had to go a lot of places in formations, and sit through classes, and go bivouac on the rifle range (and Ft. Dix in January is fucking cold and don't let anyone kid you) and were dosed with CS "tear" gas, and all the comic book and movie stuff. Suffice to say we got through it and moved on, and I'd be very surprised if any of us who went through "Coldsteel Alpha" that chilly winter of 1981 have spent much time or mental coin thinking back on it.So let me just tell you some stories from that time and place.

First, a little note about what we wore.

Trust me, this is not becoming a fashion blog. It's just that of all the aspects of my BCT the one thing that sets us apart in my mind is that we were the last of a long history of GIs to wear the O.D. green that had symbolized the Arsenal of Democracy since 1941.Specifically, we wore the OG-107 fatigue uniform, better known as the just "fatigues" or as the "pickle suit". We wore the rubber-sole black "boot, combat" that had been standard since the Fifties, and the whole ensemble was topped off with one of the most ridiculous items of headwear ever invented by the U.S. Army, the OG-106 "baseball cap".The cardboard stiffener in front was designed to get bent into all sorts of moronic looking shapes, and the fake-leather band was sweat-droolingly hot in summer and icy cold in winter.

The thing is, the pickle suit had been a very stylin' outfit. The drill sergeants nearly all had the old all-cotton versions from the Sixties. These typically faded to a pale green and took starch like a Congressmen to a lobbyist's cashbag; they could be creased to razor sharpness and looked terrific. Our later, cotton-polyester, like nearly all polyester products from the Seventies, looked, well, like shit, especially if you threw in the moronic cap.

But that was just for the guys. Really, let's not even talk about what may have been the most horrible atrocity committed by the U.S. Army outside of My Lai; the female summer Class A uniform, otherwise known as the "Slimey Limey", a jaw-droppingly ugly "mint green polyester knit skirt and jacket uniform" that would have worked spectacularly as birth control device for Messalina or any of the other great horizontals of history. On a normal American woman it looked like leprous death, was universally despised, and was perhaps the only reason the gals looked forward to going into the AG-44 Army Greens.

But back to the issue of O.D.; in our fatigues we looked like GIs had since North Africa, we were living a great tradition and an honorable lineage so, being GIs, we all hated the pickle suit and longed after the cool camouflage uniforms that the Marines had.

Had we known that the BDU was going to be that uniform, well...I'll leave that for another day.

The one other big difference in my BCT was a less permanent one. We had a "mixed" company, men and women together.

This was all part of the post-Vietnam VOLAR experiment and one that wrapped up soon thereafter. I have no idea which genius thought that the ladies from 1st "Fox" Platoon would live as chaste and stainless as the Sisters of Charity right upstairs from 2nd "Flame" and 3rd "Herd" where the lusty lads were bunked, but the fireguards on the landings were meeting cute every night, and I was told later that the unoccupied cadre rooms down at the end of the 1st Platoon floor were like a Fellini movie from midnight to first call.

But I never got in on all this hearty wooing; I was first a squad leader, then the platoon guide (trainee platoon sergeant) and was excused duty keeping the watches of the night and all that healthy young American soldier girl lovin'. All I remember it got me in return was the headaches of nannying forty other ignorant young people and Private Skrodinsky, the platoon's living Polack joke.

There was this time when Skrogie, cleaning his rifle, was showing the Kim brothers how the buffer spring could be compressed all the way down the buffer and (through an excess of CLP, or so he claimed later) shot the thing out the second-floor window into the truckbed of Drill Sergeant Reynold's truck...

...But that was later.Anyway, we managed to fumble through what I now recognize was a pathetically inadequate entry training, learning just enough to have gotten us killed within a day or so of genuine combat. But keep in mind we were the ash and trash of the Army; cooks, clerks, medics, truck drivers. The Army saw no reason - having forgotten the lessons of Vietnam and unseeing the ruinous guerilla wars to come - in teaching us REMFs how to really fight. After all, that was what Eleven-Bullets were for.Funny, when I think back on the time now I have a vague memory of cold, and being constantly a little tired, and of poor instruction inadequately delivered. And of a handful of memorable events, some because of the place, some for the people, some for the pure weirdness of them.

The Night of Sergeant Layne was one of the latter.

SSG Ricardo Layne was the junior drill sergeant for 2nd Platoon - this being a time when the Army was working under short commons each platoon had two instead of the authorized three - and was a native of some sort of Caribbean country. He was very tall, very black, and spoke, when at all, with a distinctive island accent.

SSG Layne was the "good cop" to SFC Nelson's "bad cop" - he was the cool, calm one next to the platoon sergeant's gruffness.

So it came as something of a surprise to hear him roaring at us in the middle of a dark February night.

We formed up in the hallways outside our barrack rooms in our skivvies, shivering and clueless, as he ramped and roared up and down the shiny linoleum, inching our toes away from the jump boots that glittered like black diamonds, even on pre-dawn CQ. It took some time for us to understand what he was furious about, and even longer to really "get" the impact of his fury, but finally we got it - we had used all the week's ration of toilet paper.

Remember, this was before the fat times; we were still "Carter's Army", still poor, still skimping to get by. We only got so much bog roll, and here it was almost Thursday and it had all disappeared up our capacious backsides.

"Joo pipple..."

Layne ranted,

"...joo 'ave been ussing en-tirely too mooch toilet pepper. Now Aye am not shoore if t'is is doo to joo pipple 'ave been inadequately instroocted in de joose of de Joo Ess Army toilet pepper, or because joo is joost full of chit. Dat doan matter, because dis is de last toilet pepper joo will get until NEXT week, and joo will 'ave to learn to use eet correctly or joo will just 'ave to use joor entrenching tool, which of course joo will clean properly afterwords..."

I'm not sure what happened after that; I think we went back to try and get another hour or two's rack. And we didn't run out of buttwipe again.

But he sure was mad.

Of course, it wasn't just us fucking up.

One afternoon late in the three-month training cycle (so it must have been some time late in March) the three of us platoon guides were told to have our units "in the classroom" after noon chow for some reason. So at 1300, good as gold, all three little soldiers called their units to atention, put them "at ease" and turned around to await their masters.

Only no one came.1310 came and went, and then fifteen minutes, and the three of us called out our first squad leaders and ran to meet in front of my platoon. What had happened? What was wrong? We concluded that we had been supposed to form up at "the classroom" - in our experience the battalion theatre down at the end of the street - and had missed some vital instruction. Confident now in our understanding of the situation, we returned to our platoons.

"Platoon, atten-shun. Right face. Forward...march!" and off the street we went, three little blocks of wanna-be GIs. Column right onto the battalion street (get out there, road guards!), column right and column left into the theatre parking lot. Countercolumn. Halt. File from the right, column left...march and into the dim seats.

And then...nothing.

I think it must have been another fifteen minutes when the side door slammed open and one of the holdovers who was acting as a sort of dogsbody and general nuisance around the company stuck his head in and yelped.

"Don't move!"

We looked at each other. Hunh? Don't move...where?

Well, we found out about a nanosecond later; the cadre poured in like OD Goths swarming through the Porta Appia. We were driven outside, marched back to the company area and herded into the company classroom (in the basement of our barrack) which was the intended location of whatever silly thing we had been intended to do. The three of us platoon guides were questioned mercilessly until our drill sergeants were satisfied that we had just made an honest mistake and had not been attempting to escape.

And I think they were a little frightened by our initiative as well as chagrined at losing 120 GIs for half an hour.

I don't remember much else, other than little oddiments. Somehow we managed to get through the POI and move on without killing ourselves or each other, and I suspect that most of us made fairly decent soldiers in one way or another.The old BT post is all but closed now, and my old barracks has been made into some sort of low-security prison. The soldiers are pretty much all gone, and the units, as well. The quiet streets of the old post are mostly empty, and the cold winter winds no longer carry the sound of marching cadences sung far away.

Far Overhead

The date of my arrival on Earth as an individual was marked, according to Wikipedia, by "...panic overt(aking) the American public, which created an enormous sense of vulnerability regarding the United States' ability to defend its territory. Adding to this fear was the element of surprise...which left the American public in what was observed as a “wave of near-hysteria"

I wasn't responsible. Really. I wasn't.

It was this guy...

"Простейший Спутник-1"

...better known as Sputnik.

Funny, in a way; the birth of the Space Age (or at least the Space Race) the same day as my own. And here we are just over half a century later with the Space Age reduced to a sagging badly-maintained space station loafing about in high Earth orbit with no particular purpose and nothing to look forward to except obsolescence.

I hope this is not a personal commentary as well.

Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce called Sputnik's radio signal "an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority."

No one ever described me quite so poetically.

Well, damn.

My Soviet counterpart lasted 90 days. The radio transmitter fell silent in early November when the batteries went dead. The satellite's low orbit decayed through the autumn of 1957 until on 4 JAN 58 the object re-entered Earth's atmosphere and was consumed in a fire that probably lasted no more than a few seconds.

The reentry is not reported to have been observed.And here I still am.

Little PS-1 might just have been responsible for much of the modern world. It stunned the U.S. public and jump-started much of the Fifties and Sixties science boom in my country. The Wiki entry says that Sputnik-1 "...would eventually invent the Internet, upon which this page is published, NASA, and an increase in U.S. government spending on scientific research and education. One consequence of the Sputnik shock was the perception of a "Missile Gap." This was to become a dominant issue in the 1960 Presidential campaign"

Which leads me back to last night.

As I was driving home I got to thinking.

Who am I?

What am I doing, and why?

When I was a child I dreamed like a child. Except I dreamed that I would shake the world, that I would leave a name that would echo down the years with a grandeur and a whispering, like Hulagu Khan with his pyramid of skulls.

And then I grew up into the real world.

But when I was a younger man I still had at least some pretensions to playing a part on the world's greater stage. Not inventing NASA or the Internet, perhaps, but as a soldier I was involved in events that changed the way the world wagged, for better or worse. I went places and did things that, in their small way, impacted those places and things. I had notions about the world and my ability to affect it, and those notions, while exaggerated, made me at least believe that I was changing the world and the lives of the people in it.I spent a moment yesterday reading about the people who are "occupying Wall Street". For all that I think they are a quixotic and forlorn hope they are, at least, acting out their beliefs and those beliefs - that my country is and continues to be fallen into the hands of malefactors of great wealth and that only by prying that wealth from the levers of power will there be any chance that the Lesser Breeds such as I and my family will have any chance at having a say in our own futures beyond mere random chance - while my part is to sit and read about them and then go home to my dinner.

I think about myself today; slowed, domestic, exercising myself in the public fora through nothing more than this pallid electronic medium...and contrast that with the younger man in his jump boots and aid bag.

I think about joining that group in Zucotti Park, about more; about the kind of men who fought the company thugs and the National Guards for the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day, who fought the FBI and the state troopers for civil rights, who fought the British soldiers for liberty and law.

And immediately think; but what about my family?

Who will work to pay off their mortgage, their schooling, their food? Who will help them with their homework, find their stuffed pets (my son just awoke crying that his small stuffed manatee had swum away somewhere in the bedding. At eight years old. At two in the morning. Sheesh.), who will help my bride through her transition to her next job if I am arrested, if I lose my work fighting the banksters...if I'm suddenly not there, who will be?

Thus does domesticity - and my own fears - make a coward of me.

Don't get me wrong. I've had a hell of a fucking good half-century-and-four. I've lived well and foolishly, loved badly and immoderately, sampled life here and there and liked the taste of it. I've seen the sun come up over the Red Sea and set into the mountains of Panama. I've caressed the naked skin of the woman who has borne our children, and felt the fear of violent death and the elation of its passing-by.

And I have, I hope, more yet to come; pride, and passion, the work of helping my children to grow strong and good, in fighting (still...) in what ways I can to make my house, my city, my nation, and my world more honorable, more equitable, more honest, and more realistic places than they might be without my mite's worth.

But I wouldn't be human, and I wouldn't be who I am, if I didn't regret not being...more than I am.That I didn't invent the Internet or pile up my pyramid of skulls no longer troubles me.

But still, in these quiet early morning hours, I can't keep myself as I sit at my darkened desk in my silent house from straining, just a bit, to hear the faint beep-beep-beep in the night sky far overhead.

Punic War

Ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam.

Understand that, unlike Cato, I say this not in hate but in sorrow.

I WAS the GOP once. Like my father before me, I was a "social liberal and fiscal conservative", something that was later called an "Eisenhower" or "Rockefeller" Republican (and even later a "Republican In Name Only") but was then just called a "Republican".

Like my father, like those other "Republicans", I loved the myth of "traditional America", the fictional Rockwell America of front porches and small towns, of gritty cities and steel mills, of Boy Scouts marching on the Fourth, of the Four Freedoms, of the idea of a nation that offered itself not to a race, or a creed, or a language, or a "culture" but to an idea, the idea of "liberty and justice for all", of laws instead of men, of equality of opportunity for anyone who wanted it. An America whose strength was for protection, not conquest or intimidation. That looked at itself in terms of social and collective rights, and individual responsibilities.

An America that held onto the best of its past, but still looked forward in anticipation. That accepted its past, and all the wrongs and evils that it did, but still saw in itself the promise, the promise of a saner, more just, more rational, more united tomorrow. An America that didn't really yet exist, but lived in the hearts of those who wanted it to.

And I also loved the idea that this America let you alone to sit in the shade of your own fig tree. That allowed you to swing your fist each way free, so long as it didn't stray within arm's length of my nose. That let you love whom you pleased, work (or not) where and when you pleased (so long as you accepted the Grasshopper's Bargain and didn't whine if you froze that winter after lounging through the long summer days), that let - no, demanded - that you act the adult; gather your information, gain your wisdom, assess your options, make your choices, and live with the results. And that this America would either stand aside and let you make those choices, or actively support you in making them - against the meddling of those who would treat you like a fool or a child and try an either make them for you, or deny you even the choice.

Now, understand; I know that this America was a myth.

That the "real" America was often just a nation like any other, full of fools and knaves, founded on the extermination of the original residents of the continent with a healthy dose of chattel slavery. That the promises detailed above were as often ignored, and even willfully violated, as respected. That real American conservatism in it's Republican form was often no more than ignorance, prejudice, Know-Nothingism, small-town bigotry and Kiwanis insularity. That after its origins as the Party of Liberty just before the Civil War the Republican Party later became, and - especially after the Crash of 1929 - was often little more than, the Party of Privilege, demanding obedience to the notions of wealth, power, and the rule of the "rich, the well-born, and the able".

But like my father, I believed that there was these lies could be formed into a truth, and give virtue to the "conservative values"; caution, tradition, uncompromising honesty, civic virtue, personal integrity and responsibility. That compassion for others was founded on stern discipline for oneself. That being part of a social contract imposed duties, rather than rights. Indeed, that the rights sprang FROM the duties. That personal matters were personal and the business of the individual, but that every individual had the public duty, even the smallest and weakest of us were called upon to contribute our widow's mite. That to great power, and great wealth, came the greatest responsibilities.

This is what I thought were Republicans.

Once.

I can pinpoint almost to the year when I began to see this change; when the Southern Democrats, the old slavers, the race-baiters, the Jim Crow lovers of the Lost Cause became Republicans and brought their vile poison into the GOP.

And this was after the Party of Lincoln had fought an exhausting war against the small-town bigots of Taft, the lovers of fascism, the isolationists, the Rotarians who wanted to discard everything BUT the Rockwellian myths. When Ike refused to throw out the New Deal, when those of us on the Right who accepted that that cunning old aristocrat FDR had made the best Deal for our country in trading the wealth of a few for the betterment of the many...in abandoning the Gilded Age John-D.-Rockefeller Republicanism of "the-public-be-damned"...we became what I saw as a genuine American conservative party.

But like all Americans, the Second Civil War - the Civil RIGHTS War - forced us to choose.

And we chose wrong.

We chose first the principled scoundrel Goldwater, who then gave way to the unprincipled scoundrel Nixon. The culmination was the idiot Reagan, whose utter cluelessness and preference for the myth over the truth helped knock down the doors that the New Deal had nailed shut; the doors that contained the malefactors of great wealth and the scum of inherited privilege. Reagan, whose intellectual heirs - if they may be dignified with the term - began frantically beavering away at returning the nation to October 23, 1929.

On the way the Party picked up even more loathsome baggage; the Christopathic bigots of the unreconstructed Great Awakening, the moral nannies looking for motes in others' eyes, the bullying morons demanding that everyone around them defer to their willful ignorance, the rapacious corporate remoras (who, admittedly, had always been ours but who went from gobbling up the scraps to directing the target of the shark's teeth), the hucksters and imperialist fools and grifters that remembered that you can fool some of the people all of the time.

And that's where we are today.

Look at the Republican presidential prospects for the coming year. Look at what the state of the Party has done to them, or, rather, what they have done to themselves to make themselves acceptable to the sort of people who are now considered "Republicans".

Consider this woman, who is now the ideal to which these "Republicans" are told to aspire, and the degree to which this requires adherents of the GOP to believe three incompatible things before breakfast.

Consider the unhinged rantings of the people who speak for the Party, people who treat lies like currency, to spend whenever they desire something; Limbaugh, the "Majority Maker" himself; Beck, Coulter, Malkin, Savage, McArdle, Brooks, Krauthammer...has there ever in history been such a licensed pack of meretricious and shortsighted meeching fools, charlatans, buffoons, and scoundrels?

And as yet there is no voice from the ranks to call these unprincipled liars to book. No one to insist that reason trumps conviction, and that sense should rule sensibility. No one, in short, who represents me.

But there is worse.

Simply by existing, this congeries of stuffed barneys forces the entire political discussion away from sensible accommodation in pursuit of the ridiculous phantasms that constitute the modern GOP's "agenda". The oligarchs that in fact largely provide that agenda may be excused; they are rapacious and honest about it. It is the honest idiots that comprise most of the Party that are inexcusable, and their ignorance and credulity are combining to prevent even the simplest and most compassable of solutions to the problems the United States faces, and will face, in the 21st Century. Their impenetrable conjunction of pride, greed, stupidity, anger, and foolery is making this nation ungovernable; they cannot govern when they are elected, and when rejected, conspire to prevent others from governing.

There is no other solution.

The GOP must be destroyed.

You know you want them

I stopped at the Fred Meyer's tonight to get some milk, beer, butter, and the kiddos some cereal. And as I wandered down the cereal aisle, feeling the diabetic coma coming on from all the crystallized sugar around me, I realized that I could not find any Alpha-Bits.

Remember Alpha-Bits?

I used to love those nasty, sugary things. All lettery, crunchy, and glued all over with the finest beet-sugar product. Mr. Breakfast says that the original cereal idea was

"the brain child of an Italian-American pasta lover named Al Clausi. At the time, Clausi was the head of product development for General Food, Post's parent company. He had the idea to run cereal ingredients through a machine designed to create different-macaroni shapes. Once the cereal ingredients (primarily oat flour and corn starch) were formed into letters of the alphabet, the pieces were exposed to a flash-cooking process known as "gun-puffing".

Whoa. Now that's pretty cool.

But not tonight. There was no joy in North Portland; Daddy struck out on Alpha-Bits.

I guess they're just not hip enough, now-enough, for NoPo anymore.

While I'm talking about kid cereals, though, I should tell you this story.

In the late Sixties and early Seventies my family lived in a suburb of Chicago. My father, who made his living in the chemical business, made frequent trips throughout the Midwest to call on customers buying his water-soluble polymers like CMC and Klucel. During the summer he would often take his wife and kids along, the entire little Sixties American family stuffed in the big forest green Ford Fairlane station wagon.With kids and bags, blankets, pillows, books, and snacks all tumbled inside this Medicare sled my father bored along the small interstate roads of the upper Midwest; Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, en route to dying factory towns with dusty grain mills, paint plants, and fiberboard factories.Once there it was usually my mother's job to entertain the littles, finding parks for my sister and I to play in, reading us (or, when we were old enough, find places for us to read) books, or, most often, taking the public tours of the various business places my father was pitching his products to.

So it was on a hot afternoon in August, probably sometime in 1969 or 1970 that my little sister, my mother, and I found ourselves waiting at the bus stop outside the General Mills plant in Minneapolis, Minnesota.It was a warm day, for Minnesota, and remember that this was 1969; the notion that a young mother should drag an immense rucksack full of wherewithall for her spawn to eat, drink, play with, or wear was inconceivable. So we had no drinks, no toys, nothing to eat.

Except the complimentary box of the brand new "Kaboom!" breakfast cereal we had been handed at the end of the GM factory tour.

The bus back to our motel was late, my dad had the car, and with cell phones a distant future there was nothing to do but wait. Being poor waiters, my sister and I began to whine incessantly if not creatively. We whined for something to drink, something to do, something to eat. Finally, our (I realize now) desperate mother shoved the box of "Kaboom!" at us.

"Eat this, then, dammit, it's supposed to be for kids." she snarled.

So we ate the Kaboom!

(As an aside, am I alone in remembering when "sugary" was considered just an adjective for describing kid cereals? Hell, there was a cereal named "Sugar Pops" and another named "Sugar Smacks". Sugar; it was what's for breakfast. God; what the fuck were we thinking. But that stuff sure was good.)

For breakfast. With milk. I can't think of anything less appetizing on a sweltering summer day than harshly-sugary, brightly-colored dry cereal grain. But it was all we had. It looked just like it does on the box; crayola-hued, vacantly-grinning death masks of sugared cereal. It looked frightful and tasted worse. We choked it down, complaining bitterly all the way back to the hotel. Kaboom! remained our lead standard for awful kid food for years.

I have never eaten the stuff again, nor do I ever intend to. It was only now, researching this post, that I find that Kaboom! lasted until this very year. But no more. General Mills finally pulled the stuff from production after more than a generation.

Alas, Kaboom, we hardly knew ye.

And if you are no longer for this world...can the End of Alpha-Bits be far behind?

Every day, a little more of the world I knew when I was young disappears.