You're Welcome

I got a "friend request" yesterday on Facebook. She's a good person and I like her a lot, and I "friended" her. The first post I saw from her was something "thanking" GIs for their service and I thought, oh, fuck, yeah.

Memorial Day.

And I thought; y'know, I reeeeeeally need to be nicer when people "thank me" for being a GI.

I have a problem with that.

For one thing, I didn't do it for anyone other than my own selfish reasons. I certainly didn't do it for anyone's thanks. I did it for my own fucking entertainment and adventure, had a rollicking good time doing it (peacetime soldiering is kind of like that, if you subtract the chickenshit, the boredom, and the bursts of outright fucking goatscrewlicious fucktardry), was well paid in the process, and my time in the Army had about as much to do with your "liberty" and "freedom" as an extra in the Vivid Video production of Backside To The Future has with the Virgin of Guadalupe.

It's not easy keeping my piehole shut when someone "thanks" me for running around on the government's tab. The sort of reflexive soldier-tongue-bathing that has become customary in the Second Imperial era of the United States kinda gets up my wick.

It's just meaningless words, for one thing, like the "bless you!" after a sneeze, but it's not just the meaningless words. It's that most of the people thanking me - those I know, anyway - do little or nothing to actually thank those men and women whose service has left them damaged, as service in war tends to do. They don't help in VA hospitals, or help out homeless veterans, or seek to comfort the widow and the orphan or bury the dead or succor the living.

They don't try and learn anything about those who have died; who they were, why they served or where they were killed and why.

Don't get me wrong. They're lovely people. They just have other things to be and do and the actual effort to find out who these people were and why they were where they were when they died would be asking a lot of their busy lives.

But they want to "thank" someone without doing all that hard work.

So it's a combination of irritation at the emptiness of the gesture...and irritation at the sense that the person making the gesture is making it instead of doing the hard work to make it less empty.

I want to snarl something like "Don't thank me...I didn't fucking do it for you!" and then I feel like a shitheel for wanting to say that. These aren't bad people. They just don't...know. And I'm not sure I know what to do, either about them, or about the way I think about them

But I have a suggestion.

If you see a guy or gal with a service stripe - however you know they've served, and in whatever capacity - first thing; buy 'em a drink and drink to their continued survival. They're making it, day by day, and goddamn if that doesn't deserve a toast, regardless of whether they fought like Chesty Puller or never did anything but shoveled shit in Alabama.

Here's to us. Who's like us? Damn few, and they're all dead.

Drop around the local VA and see if there's anything you can help with.

Read a newspaper. Hell, read two. Check out a couple of websites - make sure you get a good variety of political opinion - and read up on the places where your country might send your friend, or your neighbor's kid, or the guy at the bus stop to fight, possibly kill, or die.

If you read all that stuff and come to the conclusion that it'd be stupid, bone-stupid, preternaturally box-of-rocks fucking-shoveling-water stupid to send any of those people to fight, possibly kill, or die in those places because of the immense likelihood that their fighting, killing, and dying will do nothing more than fuck up a place that's already fucked up fifteen ways...do something about that:

- Vote against the douchenozzles that try and stampede you and your neighbors into sending those Americans to those places. Refuse to be "terrorized" by nonsense about Islamic headcutters driving their pickups across the Atlantic Ocean to hide under your bed. That'd be stupid. If you want to thank me for my service? Don't be stupid.

- Find out if your Congressperson or Senator has voted for wars and rumors of wars...and at the same time cut funding for the VA, or for things like PTSD treatments, counseling, or military pensions. Find out if they're part of the MICC - the "Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex" that votes funding for ridiculously expensive weaponry or bloated military budgets without inquiring what all this tax money is going for (audit the defense budget? Why, yes, that's an excellent idea...)

- Vote against anyone who tells you that spying and snooping and warrantless searches and "national security letters" are crucial for "defending America". If you believe that what you end up with isn't "America"; at least, not the one the Founders and Framers had in mind.

Run for school board. Defend a banned book. Stand up for things like free speech, even if you don't like what's being said...hell, especially if you don't like what's being said. Insist on things like the freedom from people who want you to write their religion into law, even if it's your religion and you'd like it to be the law. Hell, especially if it's your religion. Church and state, remember..? That tree suit didn't have a cross or a crescent or a wheel on it, and our belt buckle didn't read Gott mit uns. Those were the fucking bad guys. Want to thank me for my service? Thank me by not being a fucking bad guy.

All this stuff is hard, I know. But, hey...you wanted to "thank me" for my service. That service was a lot of things...but it wasn't easy.

So "thanking me" should mean more than just meaningless words. It should mean taking some responsibility for serving your country, too...in all the ways I've talked about. That's not easy, but being a citizen of a republic shouldn't be any easier than being one of its soldiers, and that means you - and I - still have lots of work to do; after all, the reward for work well done is...more work. Right?

You're welcome.

(And, as always on the day-after-this-least-beloved-of-all-holidays (I was busy kid-wrangling yesterday and didn't get to the computer, so today is my Memorial Day post, sorry...): this.)

American Anthem

Hey! It's a chilly rainy Saturday in Portland and who's up for some Montenegro?

Is that a great song, or what?

I needed something to be cheerful about after watching my beloved Norwich City make FA Cup history by getting shot dead square in the ass by Luton Town. Don't get me wrong; I loves me some FA Cup, but, damn, when a season goes to hell sometimes it really goes to hell.

Anyway, from there I wandered over to Gin and Tacos where this discussion of national anthems led me to this discussion of National Anthems.

The Grantland article (the second link in the paragraph above) is funny but there's some genuine truth to it.

When you get past the essential silliness of the whole concept of a "national anthem" you eventually get around to the historical use of singing as a way of bringing people together and firing them up emotionally. As I talked about the other day; some emotions just lend themselves to song. They just do. "Patriotism"? Yep.

But part of that really does involve the actual song.

And I happen to agree with conventional wisdom and agree that The Star Spangled Banner - as a song - isn't all that as a "man the barricades sort of thing. It IS hard to sing, and it does lack a certain...je ne sais pas...something that the boys from Montenegro, and the Gosudarstvenny Gimn Rossiyskoy Federatsii, and La Marseillaise have in abundance;

Let's face it; if you're going to have a song about your country, singing it should really make you excited about your country. Patriotism is, of course, a ridiculous tribal atavism that has fueled some of the most dangerous and destructive idiocy ever perpetrated by the human race. But.

But...

It's hard to deny that there is something very satisfying to the human soul to be part of that crowd uplifted by that singing, feeling that shiver that comes with the sensation of being armored and armed with participation in something that makes you feel bigger and stronger than your own small self. As Phillips says over at Grantland:

"A good anthem has to do a lot of things. It has to inspire. It has to instill loyalty to the nation-state. It has to be singable. Most important, it has to capture a mysterious and complex feeling of being simultaneously (a) in church, (b) about to charge the enemy trenches, and (c) at a really great New Year's party."

Those aren't very nice feelings, really, when you think about it. They have made and will make us do awful things in the name of "patriotism".

But, then, they have made us do some genuinely noble and heroic things, as well.

So I suppose what it comes down to is that even a bombastic poem set to an old pub drinking song can do that trick, when you sing in a certain way. I remember how I felt when I sang it then:

Ten feet tall and bristling with spines.

So, are we bad? Maybe so. For all our song doesn't make the Top Ten.

But maybe not quite as badass as the folks from Montenegro...

The seething hot magma at the core of the world —
Bring us our tankards, we want to drink some for breakfast!
We wean our babies on lava, and they can't get enough.
By the time they're 6, they could beat an oak tree at wrestling.
Everyone! Do you understand that we are ferocious?
We have ventured down among the bones of the mountains,
Where we killed like 50 or 60 dragons,
We didn't even keep track, that's how easy it was.
My beard is the moss that binds the stone of God's fury.
Drink with us! Drink with all of us! Be welcome!
We will wipe the floor with you and leave you for dead.
I'm in a good mood! I may dismember a bear.

Feel like humming along?

Cool.

Kicked in the face

Those of you who have been peeking in here regularly probably know that I'm what the British would probably call "a bit about football".

Or, if you haven't, as we say here in the Land of the Free (Providing You Make More Than $100,000 a Year), I loves me some soccer. The Army I still serve is the Timbers Army, and I'm as proud of my green-and-white scarf - in some ways - as I ever was to wear the green of that other army, the one with the condos and the yachts (OK, trivia fans - what's the movie reference there..?).

But this isn't a great time to be a Portland supporter.

To say that we've hid a bad patch would be like saying that the Titanic had a troubled evening in the North Atlantic a hundred years ago this spring. Yesterday I had the unenviable "pleasure" of watching my club get spanked by a piss-poor expansion side from Montreal, a club that we routinely demolished when we were both down in the U.S. Second Division.

And, worse, the Boys in GreenRed LOOKED like a club going off the rails. Disorganized. Lifeless. What one of my old platoon sergeants would have described as "cotton balls" - 100% sterile. Against one of the worst defenses in the league we created something like two real attacking chances.

I can't think of a moment that summed it up better than the second half collision between Montreal's Nyassi, who was lunging for a through-ball that was headed on goal, and our goalkeeper Perkins, who ended up with a cleat to the face that tore open his nose and sent him out of the match and our chances with him. The wretched Montreal team went on to thrash us, and we lay there like a head-kicked 'keeper and simply took it.

We were a fucking disaster.

And this, in turn, brings me to the dilemma of the true supporter; whether it's of Club or Country.

I hate to keep coming back to this, but soccer is a cruel game because it is so like Life itself.

As with our lives, and with our nations, there are so many, many ways to go wrong. And, once lost, our lives, our sport, our nation are damn deadly difficult to right again. Loss and ruin, like the cold, cruel edge of the iceberg, lie just beneath the deceptively still waters ahead. One moment we seem to be gliding along listening to the band and sipping our cocktail; the next, the frigid waters are closing over our head as we try to comprehend the degree to which we have been complicit in our own fate.

Whether it is as a partisan of a soccer club or a patriot of a great nation, there is always the inclination to trust in and support the object of one's devotion. To believe that the best course is to continue to have faith that the leaders of those institutions are wise, clever, and far-seeing. That they are making decisions based on great vision and broad experience, secure in their knowledge of themselves and their craft.

And as a supporter, as a citizen, there's also the problem of power; there is very little in us as individuals. A lone angry voice floating down from the North End terraces, a puny blog against the collective "wisdom" of the Village, single vote lost in a torrent of poorly-thought, misinformed, emotionally-charged herd choices...

There's no dignity there, in kicking against the pricks. The temptation is to simply close our eyes and hope.

But what if that hope is a fool's hope?

Or, worse, what if it enables those whose task is supposed to be "leading" - leading our club, leading our country - but who are blinded by self-satisfaction, or misinformation, or prejudices, or bone-stupid, or misplaced loyalty?

When does it become the task of the "supporter" to support not the Front Office but the club itself? Not the President, or the Congress, but the nation?

Or, worse; when does it become so painfully obvious that there is no solution in sight? That the entire system is so violently distorted that the answers cannot come from the inside, as the inside of the system is presently constituted.

What does a True Supporter do, then?

Because at the moment, staring over the bloodied rag that we're holding to our shattered face, we seem to be facing a crisis; one of the many we have faced, will face, in the history of our nation and our club. And a supporter, and a citizen, are called upon to lend themselves to their countries.

But how can we both support them and change them? How can we love them yet hate what they have become? Where do we cross the line, between Reformation and Revolution? Where is the divide between a rough caress and a kick in the face?