Die erste achtundvierzig Stunden...

Occupy Portland is over.An ad-hoc force of police from several places including Portland Bureau today cleared the two downtown parks that Occupy had occupied. The protesters have regathered in several other downtown sites to "discuss" their next move, but in my opinion this is the end for Occupy.

For more than a week the local pols, newspapers, and television outlets have been voicing increasing impatience with Occupy and, truthfully, it seems hard to imagine how the "protests" would have done anything more than they have which beyond generating a sort of unfocused unease amongst the chattering classes has been no more than an irritant under the silken drawers of the rich and powerful.

It's been more than forty years since the mild insurrections of the U.S. Civil Rights era, half a century since the "nonviolent" protests of the Indian National Congress forced Britain's release of her Indian colony, a full century since the end of the violent strikes and near-rebellions that empowered the American labor unions.In the interim we have forgotten that "peaceful" protest is exactly as effective as "peacefully" resisting a savage beating unless you have your "peaceful" beating carefully planned to maximize your PR value - and it helps if your opponents are frigging morons, or politically and financially exhausted.

The civil rights marchers won because the Southern bigots were stupid enough to physically attack well-dressed men and women on national TV and newspapers. The Indian factions won partially because BG Dyer was a fucking bloodyminded idiot and partially because the Empire exhausted itself fighting two world wars. You could argue that the labor unions didn't actually win, but rather reached a sort of armed truce that lasted until the plutocrats shat the bed in 1929 and helped elect a labor-friendly administration.

Occupy had none of these to help it. Instead, it faced a massively corrupted and paid-for military-industrial-congressional-financial complex that is doing quite well under the present system. Any hopes of an FDR moment disappeared early in 2009 when it became obvious at least to me that the current Democratic administration had no interest in even trying cocking a snook at the banksters. The New New Deal this wasn't.

And the Occupiers forgot the other lesson of those earlier protest movements; that the public could give a shit about your politeness. The relative discipline of the Occupiers ended up looking like meekness, and regardless of what the Good Book says the meek won't inherit jack shit without a pair of brass balls, friendly press, and a sackful of bricks and cobblestones hidden away in case all the politeness doesn't work. And Occupy Portland had none of those things.

And ask the Paris Communards how even WITH those things, if the government is willing to ignore you when you're weak - and kill or arrest when you're strong - you you will lose.So the banksters have proved that a camel can leap laughingly through the eye of a needle. They have bought all the government they need, they or their lickspittle brownnosers own the media conglomerates, and the U.S. public is about evenly divided into thirds, and while one third is ignorant and indifferent one of the other two-thirds is actively hostile, either hoping to curry favor with the plutocracy or, tragically, mistaking the random helium in their guts for wings; by the time they fart away their good luck they will be plummeting too rapidly to have the time for regrets.

Occupy might have had more hope if the public was more intelligent and their enemies less powerful. In the first couple of days, or weeks...

But no matter. That hope is gone forever.

In March, 1935 the tiny German Army marched into the Rhineland, the first of Hitler's Thirties gambles. And it was more than a gamble; Hitler and his commanders knew how tiny their little force was. As hapless as the French Army of the Thirties was, and it was a fairly ginormous clusterfuck, a whiff of grapeshot in the old Napoleonic style would have seen the Heer packing across the Rhine and, probably, the end of the Hitler Era two years after it began.

But the French were too meek to make that move, and Hitler's success propelled him all the way to the wreck of the European world ten years later.

And here again, the first couple of days - "Die erste achtundvierzig Stunden" is how Hitler phrased it - were key.Once the larger public failed to rise in the first couple of days the Occupiers proved to have no strategy to force the issue or force their enemies to submit and their attempt to tame the bulls and bears is done.

Update 11/14: Upon further review, I had a couple of thoughts.

The antiwar protests of the Sixties have something a answer for in what they've done to the U.S. left. The protests were far less effective at "ending" the war than they seemed at the time (and have been mythologized since) - Nixon's concerns for the economy and the public's indifference to the Vietnamese were more crucial. But the result is that somehow the notion that merely marching around and sitting-in would be enough to effect political change and the record of those actions since then have proved this to be the nonsense it is.

The civil rights protestors, the INC activists, the labor movement radicals all had a collection of things that the post-'72 U.S. protests haven't:

1. An actual strategy that involved an entire range of acts, from pure theatre to violent protest, and some notion of how and where these would be applied. If OWS had anything other than "be there" I haven't seen it (mind you, the combination of vast public indifference and active media ignorance/hostility made it difficult to see how they could have done anything else effectively). And to orchestrate this these groups also had

2. An actual structured leadership - often fractious, even infighting, but the leaders were there actively planning the attacks on their opponents. The OWS seems to suffer from the goofy fuzzy-logic cloud-leadership that is to my mind the very WORST hangover of the Sixties protests. People like Lewis and Nehru and MLK were in many ways very unlikeable, manipulative, cunning sons-of-bitches. The OWS people seem to have absorbed the wrong lesson, which is that to get to a beneficent end you need to be a beneficent person. Couldn't be wronger. Many, perhaps most, of the people who have done "good" things for the mass of humanity have themselves been real bastards. You have to break a lot of eggs sometimes to make a good omlette...

Sorry that I'm such a little ray of sunshine today. But, as Matt Taibbi points out, the things that OWS is pointing fingers at aren't minor issues - they go to the very heart of the corruption of the crony-capitalist scam that has been driving the U.S. (and much of the Euro nations) back towards the Gilded Age. I'd have liked to see the U.S. and other western publics "get" that. But this doesn't seem to have happened, and at this point I have to conclude that it ISN'T going to happen. And for someone like me, who is and whose kids will be, part of the 99%, that looks like a bad thing for the future.

False Coin

I read this article and could only come up with one thought: Who the hell thought that it was a good idea to put this womanin the U.S. Army?

Look, I've served with some outstanding female soldiers. Outstanding. I'm not one of these guys who thinks that you have to have external genitalia to kill stuff for your country. But this crap is insulting to every good woman troop who ever shouldered a ruck, pulled guard, or busted her knuckles.

But I'm not sure what this article is doing outside giving this woman a place to whine (some more - sounds like all she did during her hitch WAS whine...)whilst convincing the civilian reader that the entire notion of women in uniform is a bad idea.

The writer makes it sound like she made some sort of courageous choice in defying the Bad Evil Army that wanted her to flush the offspring and drive on with her mission...instead of becoming a substandard troop, screwing around whilst downrange with some worthless d-bag, and then sniveling off to her chain-of-command with a baby in her belly to get her early-out, throwing her load on some other poor bastard who wasn't lucky enough to be a clueless minge-bag.

And wants to use Salon to get to be all righteous about it.

"The world as I knew it had come crashing down and I had struggled to make what I felt was a responsible decision. But I chose motherhood over the mission and in this guy’s world, I had made the wrong choice. Therefore, I was no longer worthy of respect. I met the old man’s contemptuous gaze with defiance. He signed my papers, and I left."

Not a moment too soon, honey.

And somewhere there's a recruiter who slipped this moron the king's shilling and used her to make his mission then walked away whistling while she wasted the taxpayer's money and her fellow soldier's patience.

There is NO justice in the world. None.

Anamchara, on her Birthday

As when a beauteous nymph decays,
We say she's past her dancing days;
So poets lose their feet by time,
And can no longer dance in rhyme.
Your annual bard had rather chose
To celebrate your birth in prose:
Yet merry folks, who want by chance
A pair to make a country dance,
Call the old housekeeper, and get her
To fill a place for want of better:
While Sheridan is off the hooks,
And friend Delany at his books,
That Stella may avoid disgrace,
Once more the Dean supplies their place.

Beauty and wit, too sad a truth!
Have always been confined to youth;
The god of wit and beauty's queen,
He twenty-one and she fifteen,
No poet ever sweetly sung,
Unless he were, like Phoebus, young;
Nor ever nymph inspired to rhyme,
Unless, like Venus, in her prime.
At fifty-six, if this be true,
Am I a poet fit for you?
Or, at the age of forty-three,
Are you a subject fit for me?
Adieu! bright wit, and radiant eyes!
You must be grave and I be wise.
Our fate in vain we would oppose:
But I'll be still your friend in prose:
Esteem and friendship to express,
Will not require poetic dress;
And if the Muse deny her aid
To have them sung, they may be said.

But, Stella, say, what evil tongue
Reports you are no longer young;
That Time sits with his scythe to mow
Where erst sat Cupid with his bow;
That half your locks are turn'd to gray?
I'll ne'er believe a word they say.
'Tis true, but let it not be known,
My eyes are somewhat dimmish grown;
For nature, always in the right,
To your decays adapts my sight;
And wrinkles undistinguished pass,
For I'm ashamed to use a glass:
And till I see them with these eyes,
Whoever says you have them, lies.

No length of time can make you quit
Honour and virtue, sense and wit;
Thus you may still be young to me,
While I can better hear than see.
O ne'er may Fortune show her spite,
To make me deaf, and mend my sight!

("Stella's Birthday 1724" by Jonathon Swift)

A crown and 205

Finally!

I've been stuck at about 206-207 pounds for a week now, and yesterday I got on the scale and I've broken that weight all the way down to 205. Yay!The only downside is I can't have a candy bar to celebrate.

By way of contrast, here's Missy's friend Barbie, who has never had a weight problem, the skinny bitch.Missy was taking pictures of her Barbies and managed to capture this image of the loneliness of beauty, a crown without a princess;I think the girl has a gift for this photography stuff, neh? So here's the little fairy princess her ownself complete with her own crown - certainly she understands the danger of beauty and the beauty of danger.That's it - just a little bragging and some Barbies. I warned you that this would be a daddy blog every now and then, didn't I?

Oh, and I wanted to post something about this whole "losing weight" thing and the one real oddity I've noticed. But that'll be for later.

Blind Spot

I deleted a post today.

That's something I don't know if I've ever done in the history of this blog, and it bugged me enough to make me want to write about it.

Yesterday I wrote two posts about "Veteran's Day", one of which is still up, the Sassoon quote, and unexceptional as such. Just the usual sort of thing I think about on these "God and the soldier we adore..." sorts of "holidays".

But the other was a rumination on the lot of women in war, and made particular mention of the horrors visited on the women of Germany in 1945. And the very first and only comment took me to task, implicitly, for being a traitorous Hun-lover and explicitly for not mentioning all the nasty things that the Nazis did in Poland and Russia and the fascist Japanese did in China, the Philippines, Honolulu and Wake (Wake?) (and, rather ridiculously in my opinion, that the Al Qaeda thugs did in New York City - and the Pentagon, which is like giving the 8th Air Force shit for bombing Luftwaffe HQ - as if the murderous individual acts of nasty criminals were the equivalent of international war) along with the bad stuff that happened to "enemy" women.

Well, that set me back on my heels.

And I re-read that post. And, sure enough, I did mention lots of places that the U.S. Army had fought in WW2, Vietnam, and the modern Middle East. Well, along with Brazzaville in the Congo and Coventry. And Hue, where the atrocities were visited upon the women of Hue by the communist invaders during Tet). But the bulk of the places I talked about were where the women of the enemies of our country had been subjected to atrocity.

And no question that while the hurricane of rape visited on Germany in 1945 was and is unequalled in modern history (the Germans themselves butchered their way through western Russia and the Ukraine but there is and never has been any suggestion of the sort of universal raping that was unleashed by the Soviet support troops in eastern Germany in the last year of WW2) overall the savagery visited on women in China and the other southeast Asian conquests by the Japanese Army, and in places like Poland and Russia by the German is orders of magnitude more bestial than anything the U.S. has visited on our enemies.

Was I, then, being overly harsh on my own nation for our conduct in war?

And, as I re-read that post, I think I was.

And rather than try and revise it or repair it I simply killed it.

Because what I would have ended up doing was trying to one-up the dead and maimed, trying to compare and contrast one atrocity against another, and that's beyond vile.

That's just despicable.

If any one thing has sickened me about war it is the unquenchable human need to trump the "enemy" suffering with one's own. You see it at it's worst in the eastern Levant, where the mutual atrocities visited on one anothers' innocents by Israelis on the one hand and the congeries of Arab states and entities on the other is endlessly paraded about to try and top the other side's grievances. So the dead of Deir Yassin or Gaza are used to try and justify the dead in a bus station bombing in Jerusalem or the kibbutz kids killed by Syrian shells or Hezbollah rockets.

All that is very human, and I am no less tempted than any other human, though I try to fight down the caveman instinct to simply assume that "Him hurt me because him bad". Some enemies ARE "bad" - the Nazis were as "bad" as any human ideal ever was. But many are just that - enemies because we want something they have, or because they want something we have, or just because we BOTH want something and can't agree to share it.

But I wondered...do I have a blind spot to "enemy" atrocities? In all my attempts to "see both sides" do I come down harder on the evil done in my name, in my country's name, than TO my country and my countrymen? Am I a secret traitor, a Hun-lover, a terrorist-hugger?

And I had to sit and think about that for a long, long time.

And here's what I think.

I think I AM harder on my own country, on my fellow soldiers, than on our enemies. I think I do stress the shame we do more than the shame done to us.

And if that makes me a treacherous enemy-embracer, then I'm OK with that.

And here's why.

Because here's the thing; our enemies often ARE our enemies because they believe and do some pretty vile and despicable things. Our history is as blotted as any nation's - we pretty much screwed the natives, and the Mexicans in the 1840's, and the Hawaiians and Filipinos in the 1890's, and the folks in Latin America pretty much all the time.

But we've also fought on the side of the angels, and more often than many nations. The fascist Japanese, the Nazi Germans, the communist Soviets or North Koreans or Chinese, the takifiri Islamists - those groups and the people who belong to them explicitly reject the notions that all men are created equal. That there should be liberty and justice for all. That people should be free from religious tyranny, from organized oppression. All the things that MY country stands or says it stands for, and I take my country at its word. And in fighting them we ARE doing a good thing in the larger sense.

Their acts, and those of their armed forces, are consistent with their beliefs; they did, and do, vile and inhumane things to weak people, women, and children, that they could have spared had they chosen to do so. That they did not disgusts and angers me, but neither surprises nor enrages me because it betrays my beliefs. I believe that those systems are vile and by their actions those who do their work confirm my beliefs.

At the same time I am proud of the promise of my own country, so when I, or others of my own breeding, do things that don't live up to that pride I am ashamed. And that shame brings with it rage at myself, for not standing up against those acts, or at those who committed them.

That is unfair, in that I am holding my own to higher standards than I hold my enemies. But I believe that in this sense our Constitution and our announced values ARE a suicide pact; if we fail to uphold them, if we judge ourselves not by our own professed values but by our merits relative to the worst beliefs we can think of, then we have indeed committed suicide. We have killed the best and the most hopeful within ourselves and our nation. I hold my nation to a higher standard as I would hold myself to a higher standard, or my own children. I would be more merciless to myself or my son for cheating, or lying, or stealing, or killing, than I would a stranger.

So if we, my country and I, kill innocents, even in error; if we torture our helpless chattels; if we seize and hold even the guilty without trial or, worse, without any sort of accountability or law whatsoever; if we do worse than we could because others have done even worse then we are guilty of not just crime but mistakes. We have made the fundamental error of losing our and our nation's ideals.

And that matters.

Because the United States is nothing if NOT an ideal. We are not Germany or France or Cambodia, a nation because of the language we speak or the way we look or the place we live in or the God we worship. We come from many places, speak many tongues, think and worship and believe many different things.

What ties us into one nation, indivisible, is the beliefs in the great words written into our national birth certificate; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

And if we forget that and become the sort of people we have chosen for our enemies and visit among them the sorts of cruelty they would visit upon us, then we are, indeed, in danger of perishing from the Earth. And while I live, I will resist that to the extent I can. And therefore I see no value in judging my acts, and those of my fellow veterans, by the worst mankind has to offer.

So rather than argue who was "worse" I deleted the first Veterans Day post. The issue of that post was the suffering of innocents, and I see no value in judging the suffering that my nation has wrought in my name by contrast to the suffering that despotisms and degraded fanatics have wrought in the name of their beliefs. The only standard I accept is the standard my nation has set for itself. If you choose another, that's your business. Start your own blog and advocate for it, or join the gang over at Powerline or Little Green Footballs; they seem to love the "more rubble, less trouble" ideal of foreign relations.

I will continue to use this space to insist that we hold ourselves to the standards I believe we stand for; that ALL men - and women - are endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even those whose leaders would attack us and deprive us of those rights. Even our enemies. And to criticize myself and my country if we choose to take the low, dirty road because it's easier. That if we are to be defeated, let it be by the enemy's arms and not by the self-murder of our own ideals and the promise that has the potential to make our nation a truly pridesome thing among the nations.

And if this be treason, I will make the most of it.

Veteran's Day: Memorial Tablet

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
(Under Lord Derby's scheme). I died in hell -
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards; so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,
He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;
For, though low down upon the list, I'm there;
"In proud and glorious memory" ... that's my due.
Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he's never guessed.
Once I came home on leave: and then went west ...
What greater glory could a man desire?~S. Sassoon

Banners

Did you know that the City of Portland has a flag?

Yep. Here it is:Here's the thing about this version of the Portland flag; it follows all the "rules" of vexillology.

It's simple - just two lines or bars crossing with a diamond in the juncture on a green field. The pattern of the crossing bars mimics the junction of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers that dominate the Portland region. It uses no more than about three or four colors, doesn't use "lettering or seals", which the flag gurus consider too busy and fussy, and while it is distinctive it's bars and stripes are similar to the stripes of the American flag.

So by the ideals of people who "do" flags, the present Portland flag is just about perfect.

But...I don't like it as much as I liked the older version:Don't ask me why. I just like the '69 version better than the '08 version.

Yes, I know that it has the fussy little City of Portland seal in the canton, a big vexil-no-no. There's just something about that little bit of fiddly archaeism that pleases me. I LIKE that it has the Portland seal complete with Portlandia commanding her teeny little ships and plows.

But, then, I'm the sort of person who likes the old-school Prussian regimental flagsBECAUSE of all the fiddly little details - the crowned eagle, the scrolls with the battle honors, the various rays and flames and royal cyphers all over. I like fiddly details of that sort. They satisfy me immensely.

I like the fact that our Oregon flag has different images on different sides, and, yes, I like the fact that we have lettering AND our seal on the obverse:and our mighty Beaver on the reverse:(and we're the ONLY state that does this, perverse creatures that we are...) And I take an equally perverse pride that the vexillologists consider ours something like the 3rd worst state flag in the U.S. I have no idea who rates below us; probably somebody like American Samoa or Guam. I like the fact that the professional flag-wavers hate us for our dorky, fussy, un-vexillogical untidiness.

Not long ago the World's Worst Newspaper ran a contest to design a replacement for our vexillologist's-most-hated flag, and here it is:Does that or does that not look like the sort of thing that would win a newspaper design contest? All simple primary colors with the simple cartoon beaver minus his beloved log, and even a little star because...well, I have no idea because why. Because...stars are special or a reference to the Star-spangled Banner? Who knows? To me it looks perfectly idiotic.

Call me a curmudgeon, then; I like the little fussy touches on my city and state flags; in the archaic and unprofessional symbols you can see the people who came before us and their love of busy detail - living reminders that flags that stand for real people and real places are as imperfect as the people who create them both.