Music of the Day, Part II: Pat Metheny Group, Still Life Talking

The other evening Dr. GDA, Jr., and I had a nice phone conversation; we live in different cities now, but before I moved away we spent a fair amount of time together, mostly in bars--actually, only one particular bar, whose owner sponsored our softball team, a half-sleazy dive near the university. We usually drank beer after games, but sometimes it seemed the only reason we had a softball team in the first place was because it gave us an excuse to drink in the evenings. Dr. GDA, Jr., was the official Manager of the team, although I think he fired himself after the first miserable season--when we won a game he took us all to the local VFW hall, after the mandatory drinking at our sponsor's bar, and plunked down a fifty dollar bill for more beer. Apparently the victory was a big deal. . . .

And as I think about it for a few minutes, I remember that Dr. GDA, Jr., was advised by his physician to cease and desist with the alcoholic beverages (a blood pressure thing), advice that Dr. GDA, Jr., took seriously--he is, so far as I know, a practicing, and practiced, teetotaler. While I received no such medical advice, having more than two beers now is so rare that I cannot remember the last time it happend. Well, not really--I had three beers one evening about a month ago. . . .

Back to the story: Dr. GDA, Jr., and I reminisced the other night about some of our old friends and acquaintances from those halcyon days of summertime softball games, cold post-game beers, and our days as graduate students together when our friendship grew in the shared desolation of a historiography class. One of our fellow sufferers was a gent from Philadelphia who had made his way to the hinterlands despite his mother's fear that he might be attacked and murdered (scalped, perhaps) by Indians while on his journey out of the City of Brotherly Love. Vincent, Dr. GDA, Jr., and I were all born within a few years of one another, so our connection was a little stronger--many of the other graduate students in our department were considerably younger and while they too had to endure the awful historiography class, Vincent, Dr. GDA, Jr., and I probably drank the most in response to the class and the unpleasant man who was teaching it.

The three of us also orchestrated more than one alcohol-fueled road trip to the nexus of sin, decadence, and depravity--Las Vegas. There was much laughter, more than enough drinking, and the only one of us who ever came home with more money than he started with was Dr. GDA, Jr.

Vincent returned to Philadelphia after three semesters and for a while we kept in touch with him--occasional letters, a phone call now and then, and as I recall, he even returned to our fine mountain town a few years later; I remember driving him back to the airport at two in the morning on the day that he left and then turning around and driving back home, sleeping in my car in the parking lot of a roadside restaurant that no longer exists (my favorite sign in the joint was on the front door, and it said "Check All Guns At Counter").

Unfortunately that's about the last time any of us heard from Vincent, although we all heard a rumor that he again left Philadelphia for some high-powered position in the mental-health bureaucracy in New York City. Since then, not a peep from or about Vincent. . . .

This is sad, as he was a good guy who had a great sense of humor and he seemed to enjoy living in our pastoral alpine burg. Joseph Epstein writes in his most recent book, Friendship: An Expose, that we have over the course of our lives various kinds of friendships, including temporary friends. It seems as if Vincent was one of those temporary friends to both Dr. GDA, Jr., and me--but we both miss him, his laughter, and his gentle demeanor. Every now and then I get a hankerin' to just go out and have a few cold ones with some old friends and laugh and talk beer-fueled philosophy and politics and religion and hatch a plan to drive to Las Vegas in the middle of the night. Speaking for both myself and Dr. GDA, Jr., wherever you are VSB, we miss you and hope you are well and happy.

AJ

Music of the Day: Hector Berlioz, Harold in Italy.

Here's a story I read in the local newspaper that almost knocked me to the floor the other day--I laughed, I cried, I thought my head was going to explode. If I get crazy in this posting, it will soon become clear why I went stark raving bug-shit. . . .

There is an entity called the California Coastal Commission comprised, I'm guessing, of well-intentioned people of various backgrounds; no names were named that I recognized or remember--no matter, really, who they are, just wait until you read what they decided to do (if you haven't already seen this in your local rag). This group, the California Coastal Commission, has sued the United States Navy to prevent the Navy from conducting sonar training exercises off the California coast. The training is meant to give our sailors the opportunity to become more adept at locating, identifying, and dealing with various underwater threats such as mines, underwater obstacles to shipping, hidden devices, and of course enemy vessels that might launch an underwater attack against the United States. As you can see there are legitimate national security issues at play in the proper training of our armed forces to detect underwater threats to the country--but apparently the people on the California Coastal Commission cannot see the value in this training.

What they see, instead, is a threat to WHALES and other aquatic creatures; the sonar the Navy uses, it is believed, makes the whales lose their hearing, after which they sometimes become disoriented, sometimes stranding or beaching themselves, at which point they die. Admittedly this is not a good thing, a bunch of dead, beached whales--it probably lowers beach-front property values every time it happens. You wouldn't want a pile of dead whales on your front lawn and nor would i, especially if my front law was some pricey piece of beach-front property in, say, Santa Barbara. So, the CCC has sued the Navy to prevent the Navy from using its sonar devices to better train its personnel to detect and deal with underwater threats. Its BAD for the WHALES. While reading the story in the paper, this is the place where my head almost exploded. . . .

What judge or court allowed this to go forward? In my view, the lawsuit is madness, pure and simple. There is no other way to put this--it's absolutely freakin' madness, California-style. These people on the CCC seem to be more concerned about the possible death of WHALES than they are about the possible death of their fellow human beings (fellow Americans). Think about it this way: No coastal sonar training means potential increased threat levels, which means that some enterprising group of whacko bad guys might find a way to float a powerful explosive device to the California coast and--boom!--the issue then becomes not just a bunch of disoriented and/or dead WHALES, but now there might be a bunch of dead PEOPLE on the beach, lowering property values and generally making a mess of things. And I can almost hear the CCC spokes-person, after such an event, decrying the loss of human life and regretting the decision to sue the Navy to prevent the training from taking place, and talking in humble and perhaps even contrite terms about the "unintended consequence" of massive human casualties. At that point, of course, it's too damned late for the victims, but hey, the intentions were good.

Good intentions are just not enough. And I have some questions that pop into my brain when I read about stuff like this, such as: Have these people been living in caves, or underwater, for the last six years? Do they not know that mad-dog terrorist groups seek to attack us again in ANY conceivable way and with maximum possible casualties? Do they not know that saving the WHALES is a good thing, but that saving PEOPLE is a better thing? Do they not know that sometimes national security is a legitimate trump to lesser issues such as disoriented or dead WHALES? Do they really mean to impede efforts to keep Americans safe (themselves included, by the way), or are they just hopelessly dim? Do they not know that the Navy will have to spend taxpayer money to makes its case in court, money that might be otherwise spent on something important, like ensuring greater safety for the country? Have they thought about what impact their suit, if it succeeds, will have on the Navy's ability to protect our coasts?

I can only imagine the glee with which this kind of news is received by those who wish to do us harm. This profoundly frivolous lawsuit is a testament to the shallowness, weakness, and morally bankrupt "thinking" of the California Coastal Commission; let's just hope the Navy perseveres and presses this case with maximum energy and let's just hope the Navy is successful in defending its desire to defend the rest of us.

AJ

More to come, but please look at this first:

http://www.slate.com:80/id/2161171/fr/flyout

AJ

Music of the Day: Sama Thiel, Africando

1. From: Preface to the paperback edition of Natan Sharansky's book (with Ron Dermer) The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, 2004: "Let us be under no illusions. There is not a single non-democratic regime in the Middle East, nor anywhere else for that matter, that wants Iraqis to be free. The regimes that deny freedom to Iranians, Syrians, Saudi Arabians, Egyptians and so many others know that success in Iraq means that the sands in the hourglass that mark their repressive rule will start running out faster than ever. They know that the vast majority of their subjects, long trained in the arts of doublethink, will lift their eyes toward a free Iraq and ask themselves a simple question: Why not here? To the formidable opposition provided by non-democratic regimes, one must add the determination of Islamic terrorist groups to wreak havoc in Iraq, correctly appreciating as they do that a free Iraq would be a monumental defeat for the war they have been waging against the democratic world for more than a quarter century,"

2. From: Strategy for a Long Struggle, by Bruce Berkowitz in Policy Review, February/March 2007: "Popular opinion is not opposed in principle to deploying forces abroad. Despite initial concerns, there has been little controversy over maintaining U.S. troops in Germany, South Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Philippines, Kuwait, Qatar, or Honduras. It's not even combat and risk that are controversial. The issue is casualties; it simply seems that Americans have less tolerance today for losing Americans in combat. (For that matter, even enemy casualties can be highly controversial.) This might not hold if a foreign war were a direct response to an attack on the United States, but otherwise, this reluctance to bear casualties must be considered in planning when and how we can use military forces."

3. From: Realists to the Rescue? by Bret Stephens in Commentary, February 2007: "Pre-9/11, terrorism did not much trouble the realist world view which characteristically treated it is a local phenomenon--a tactical rather than a strategic threat, remediable by a combination of police action and political negotiation. But that picture was plainly inadequate to explain al Qaeda: organizationally networked, geographically diffuse, unappeasable, undeterrable, nihilistic, apocalyptic, and among a frighteningly broad spectrum of Muslim opinion, popular. When the denizens of the proverbial Arab street actually took to the streets on September 11 to cheer the mass murder they had just witnessed on their television screens, or when Arab intellectuals took to the airwaves and op-ed pages to excuse, in one way or another, what happened that day, they laid bare the fact that in the Muslim world the West did indeed confront a culture--a culture of terrorism--drawing on sources not just religious but political and ideological, not just state-sponsored by populist, not just extremist but mainstream, and not just focused on local grievances but global in its ambitions and with its murderous sights fixed especially on us."

I don't have much to add other than to remark that it isn't likely you'll be reading anything like this in Newsweek or Time (publications my old friend Dr. GDA, Jr., calls "adult comic books). Perhaps these quotes will help clarify your thinking, as they did mine, and perhaps you will find these ideas useful in formulating your rejoinders when confronted with the banalities and obfuscations that flow unceasingly from the left.

AJ

Music of the Day: Chuck Loeb, Presence.

Have my recent postings created the impression that I'm "for" war? I hope not--I sure as hell hope not, as nothing could be further from the truth. Even a cursory reading of history inevitably leads to the conclusion that war is always a terrible thing, even when it is a necessary thing, and especially when it is an unnecessary thing.

I have no desire whatsoever to see another American soldier, sailor, marine, or airman killed in my lifetime; furthermore, I have absolutely no bloodlust for Iraqis or Iranians or Muslims or anyone else on the planet. Frankly, I don't know anyone who does have such a bloodlust; most people I know wish to simply live and to not worry about being killed in their place of work or worship because of religion or politics or anything else. I can't speak for other Americans, but I would be content to not give a damn one way or the other about radical Islam; the problem, of course, is that radical Islamists were not content to leave otherwise disengaged Americans alone, deciding instead to repeatedly attack us in, initially, small increments that over time grew increasingly violent and efficacious until September 11, 2001. I can't speak for other Americans, but I really don't care what religion others follow or what god or gods others worship, or if others worship a god or not--none of my business, thank you very much. That also means I don't want others to be concerned about my religion or what god or gods I worship or if I worship a god or not--none of your business, thank you very much.

And I most certainly don't want to have to worry about somebody blowing up the plane I'm about to board to visit Dear Old Mom; she's in her eighties, she lives alone (amongst many nearby loving family members and friends), she's losing her sight and her hearing, and an occasional visit from her long-distance favorite son seems to be a welcome thing. When I get on the plane, I don't want to think about mad bombers and the re-establishment of the Muslim caliphate and the beheading of Jews, and I don't want to think about war and sending more young Americans off to fight in far away places. I just want to spend a few peaceful days with Mom.

I'm not "for" war, but I'm also decidedly not for what might happen should winning this war not be an option--capitulation, surrender, and who knows what else. I'm not "for" sending more American troops into harm's way in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else. I think about RB and his fellow sailors and J. and his fellow Marines--I don't want them to leave the good old USA to face crazy people with exploding belts and nerve gas. At the same time, I don't want crazy people with exploding belts and nerve gas coming here, or firing nuclear-tipped missiles at our cities, so I hope the men and women in our military are given the tools necessary to defeat these madmen, wherever they might be. I hope our elected representatives keep this in mind.

Churchill remarked in 1938 after the capitulation at Munich that "we have sustained a defeat without a war." I hope, again, that our elected representatives in Washington DC don't reprise this situation 70 years later; it's bad enough that we abandoned the South Vietnamese, and the Cambodians, to the North Vietnamese 30 years ago, but abandoning the Iraqis and the Afghans now would be beyond criminal--and it would, I think, invite further violence from people who have repeatedly and openly vowed to kill us in ever greater numbers.

C.E. Montague wrote that "war hath no fury like a noncombatant," and that's an important idea to keep in mind, always. I hope I don't fall into that category, another old guy calling for more troops to be sent off to fight another war while the old guy stays at home and reads books and takes trips to the coast and tries to find more ways to enjoy his retirement. But in this case, I think the alternative to this current war in Iraq is a worsened situation and a far worse war down the road.

I'm not "for" war, but if there is to be a war, terrible as that might be, it ought to be fought on our terms, not theirs--and on their turf, not ours.

AJ