Music of the Day: Candy Dulfer, For the Love of You

The other day I came across a book title that intrigued me, The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West, but rather than just scampering over to the local chain bookstore to place an order, I mucked around on the internet for a bit to learn something of the author, Lee Harris. (I waited almost a full 12 hours before scampering over to the local chain bookstore to order the book--what restraint!) While doing the mucking around I came across a piece that he wrote on Policy Review in 2002 (actually the December 2002/January 2003 issue); the title of the piece is The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing. You can find this article at: http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3458371.html.

The final paragraph of the piece reads thusly: "The belief that mankind's progress, by an conceivable standard of measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the destruction or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion. Respect for the deep structural laws that govern the historical process--whatever those laws may be--must dictate a proportionate respect for any social order that has achieved the degree of stability and prosperity the United States has achieved and has been signally decisive in permitting other nations around the world to achieve as well. To ignore these facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly utopian fantasies is a sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy, but of a disturbing moral immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to understand the nature of a moral principle better than to believe that it is capable of enforcing itself. It is not. It requires an entire social order to shelter and protect it. And if it cannot find these, it will perish."

With that in mind, and with the rest of the article fresh in your mind, go to the Policy Review site on-line and look at the most recent issue (August and September 2007) and the piece by Robert Kagan entitled End of Dreams, Return of History. And while you're at it, read Elbridge A. Colby's piece Making Intelligence Smart and, just for the hell of it, finish up by reading the book review by Peter Berkowitz entitled Vulgarizing the War Debate, a scathing report on The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror by Stephen Holmes. I know that's a lot of reading for an end-of-summer day, but it's worth it, I guarantee.

What's the connection? It's cheap and easy to blame the United States for everything that's wrong in the world, and lots of people have been doing exactly that for a long time for precisely the reasons that Harris indicates in his Policy Review article. But the world would be a far worse place without our strengths--military, economic, cultural, and intellectual--and even our international competitors recognize that. Only our true enemies wish to see us weakened, our influence lessened, and our power diminished, and unfortunately this includes people within our own country.

WARNING: After this kind of serious reading, you will not be able to tolerate much of the blather and swill emanating from the current crop of Democratic presidential hopefuls. WARNING, PART II: Ditto, but to a much lesser extent, the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls. If anyone is making any of these serious connections, it hasn't been evident in the rhetoric to date.

So, go ahead and do some reading and then afterwards, trundle out to your yard, pull some weeds, have a cold Alaskan Amber, take the dog for a walk, hug your spouse or loved one, and sleep well. You will have earned a good night's rest.

AJ

Music of the Day: The String Cheese Incident, Untying the Not

In my last mini-posting I made brief reference to some recent unspecified turmoil as the reason for the paucity of postings here; suffice it to say that family-related travel and health issues have dominated our emotional and intellectual energies of late (more so for MLB than for me, but other things, politics and such, seemed less important to me, too). I'll begin by noting that all of our children are well--they are engaged, and engaging, people, they work very hard, they are cognizant of world and national events, they travel, they read and write and think, they seem to like each other and themselves, and each of them, in his or her own unique way, is making, and living, a good life. Someday, they will face with us what we are facing with our aging parents and we are confident they will be compassionate and thoughtful and loving and attentive.

That being said, I have often wondered about a phrase one hears parents use when they have a child who is born with some, or many, physical problems or emotional problems--Down syndrome or autism or some congenital disease, and the like. Those parents will invariably say how the child is a blessing to them, despite the many and varied challenges the child will bear and bring to them--emotional challenges, physical challenges, educational challenges, financial challenges, and so forth. My sense is that when parents say these things, they really mean them--the child has forced them to look at their own lives in a different way, the child has forced them to identify the truly important things in their lives, and the child requires of them extraordinary sacrifices that other parents may not even think about--but still, they say, the child is a blessing, a gift.

Two things: (1) It's too bad that all parents don't see all their children as precious gifts; there would be fewer children found dead in dumpsters if all parents of all children thought this way. (2) There is, I suppose, another way to think of these children--as terrible, frightful and perhaps overwhelming burdens, but apparently that thought doesn't occur to the parents--or if it does it goes unspoken. Maybe one has to focus on the special gift that such children are in order to, as the old song goes, accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.

But here is what I don't hear: I have never heard an adult child with an aging and ill parent, or parents, refer to their frail and ill parents as a gift. Why is this?

If the child you love is frail or ill or will remain thoroughly dependent upon your strengths and compassion and love all its life, how is that different from your aging, or aged, parents and the needs and challenges they present? What changes in our thinking?

If you have some insight into this, please let me know; every now and then the thought occurs to me that something elemental changes in us and I don't know what it is. Is it that our parents expect us to grow up and move on and become ourselves and live our lives more or less separately from their lives and that once we do that, we have some difficulty making the transition to behaving in some other way? Is it merely that caring for an aging parent is inconvenient? Is there too much foreshadowing of what will follow for us later in our own lives? Is it too hard to think of our parents as blessings when we have, perhaps, taken for granted their goodwill and encouragement and support (in all of its forms) all of our lives? Do we view family obligations differently when those obligations include caring for elderly parents? Does this happen because we seem to be a culture that is youth oriented? I don't know. . . .

And so once again the questions outnumber the answers.

AJ

Yep, that's me: A No Good Slackin' Dog. Sorry 'bout the absence of postings of late, but again turmoil has intruded on us all here at the ranch.

Soon there will be something here of a serious nature--I think.

BP report: All good. No drugs. Mom knows. I'm the good son.

Thanks for your patience.

AJ

Music of the Day: Jay Soto, Stay Awhile

Ah, nothing induces personal angst like the annual physical exam, especially after another birthday. Going into hospitals and/or doctor's offices is bad enough, but when one reaches a certain age, say over 50, the prospects for a clean bill of health diminish with each passing year; and there's the chance of being sent off for some degrading, expensive, and intrusive exam wherein some stranger inserts a foreign object, or his or her hand/forearm, into one of my orifices that, in my opinion, wasn't meant to be digitally examined by friend or foe. During some previous annual physicals, my doc, a nice woman with a pleasant smile and very straight teeth, would ask all of the necessary and appropriate questions and then she would instruct me to drop my trousers and bend over the exam table. I was always amazed by her ability to inspect both my prostate and my tonsils at the same time, but I never complained, figuring that I was getting two exams for the price of one.

This year my doc has moved on to other things which perhaps do not include sticking her hand into people's rectal cavities, so I was assigned to a male doc in the office, which was okay: I'd seen the man before for some niggling complaint that I no longer recall and he seemed like a good guy. He was a good conversationalist and had a good sense of humor. For all I know he got his medical degree at Jim-Bob's Night Med-School and Plastic Recycling Center, but he seemed like a good guy; still, I don't like doctor's offices or hospitals (this is, I think, a holdover from my own experiences as a medical corpsman in the military) so when I went to the office last week for my annual physical I was both nervous and anxious. And sure as hell, my blood pressure reading was elevated; I blamed it on my anxiety, of course, and the fact that I had two monster-sized mugs of coffee before going to the doctor's office, but the doc wasn't hearing any of that. Instead, he said I have to start taking blood pressure medication and, GASP!, he said I really ought to lose ten pounds.

Okay, so then I was pissed. I'm a few pounds heavy, I admit, because of my own recent birthday and associated meals, cakes, ice cream, and so forth, and because the day after my birthday we helped celebrate our grand-niece's first birthday, with more meals and cake and ice cream, plus lots of time sitting on my (apparently over-large) ass in the car to and from an un-named western state. I drove home after the exam and then stomped around the homestead for a while before going off to work; MLB (My Lovely Bride) stayed out of my way, detecting my foul mood, but she offered to go to the nearest pharmacy to pick up the prescription for my "elevated" blood pressure. I fumed all day at the slaughterhouse and I even threatened a co-worker with the big saw on the line that we use to slice the critters in half. At the end of the day, I had decided two things: I will not take the blood pressure medication because, obviously, their reading was an aberration and I will, in the not too distant future, challenge the doc to an outing on the tennis court. My plan is to crush the man, to run him from corner to corner for about ninety minutes, and then while he's lying on the court, gasping for breath and turning various unnatural colors, I'm going to ask him in a calm but sarcastic tone, "Okay, Jack, who needs the blood pressure medication now?!?!"

As for losing ten pounds, I'll admit I could stand to lose eight pounds. 'Nuff said. But then I started feeling guilty for not taking the man's advice, but being the stubborn fool that I am, instead of actually taking the medication, I decided to purchase one of those digital blood pressure monitors so that I could begin keeping track of my blood pressure--to either validate the doc's findings or to make myself feel better for not taking the medication. I put the batteries in the damned thing, read the instructions three times before I could figure out how to set the various electronic functions, and then took my blood pressure.

146/82. Damnit! Too high!

So my rationalization for elevated numbers THIS TIME was that I had just come back from the market and wasn't sufficiently calmed down from the walking around and the traffic to and from the store, and yadda, yadda, yadda; I'm still not entirely convinced it's time to start taking medication, so I'll take a reading later this evening and then begin taking two or three readings a day for the next few days. I do not want to begin taking medications of any kind, so I'm hoping that I can find a way to keep myself calm before taking the readings; I have to tell myself that no one is going to insert a forearm up my kazoo to check my tonsils, so maybe the numbers will be more normal in the future. If, dear readers, you believe in the power of prayer, how 'bout saying a little one for me on this, okay? Thanks. I promise I'll work on dropping a few pounds.

AJ

IMPORTANT P.S.: Please don't tell Dear Old Mom about any of this; she'll think I'm minutes from death. . . .

Music of the Day: Dave Weckl Band, Perpetual Motion

During a lull in the action at the slaughterhouse Friday morning, last, I took a little time during my break to read some of Judith Miller's article The Bomb Under Abaya in the most recent issue of Policy Review (June and July 2007, No. 143, pages 41-58). Her piece was about the apparently growing phenomenon of female Islamic suicide/homicide bombers and Miller's subsequent attempt to understand the motivation behind the actions of those females who were unsuccessful in their attempts to kill themselves and others, or those females who were caught before they were able to kill themselves and others. By the way, looking at that sentence again, I see that I have needlessly identified these females as "Islamic suicide bombers"--it goes without saying that suicide bombers are Islamic, because I know of no analogous activity by members of other religions. One never reads of Lutheran suicide bombers, or Buddhist suicide bombers, or Jewish suicide bombers, or Catholic suicide bombers.

I was struck, in part, by the abject hopelessness felt by the women described in the article and I was also struck by their sense of profound pessimism about the future. Somehow they had convinced themselves, or had been convinced by others, that killing themselves in the act of killing innocent people would be beneficial, with no specifics provided about who might benefit. During the daily lunch break, I wandered off to re-read a bit more of The Brothers Karamazov while the rest of the boys scanned their copies of Popular Mechanics, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, the Utne Reader, and our trade journal the Abattoir Update. It seems that since my initial reading of The Brothers as a senior in high school that I re-read the book every twenty or so years, and I just started the project anew a little while ago. And here's an idea that I came across that seemed to speak, directly, to the women described in Miller's article.

The context in Dostoevsky's novel has to do with those young Russian men in seminary who are "ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for [truth]. Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that THE SACRIFICE OF LIFE IS, IN MANY CASES, THE EASIEST OF ALL SACRIFICES, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply ten-fold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal--such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them." (emphasis added).

By the way, I am NOT implying by using the quote above that these poor women are in any way sacrificing themselves for "truth;" rather, they are, as one of the researchers Miller quotes who has studied these cases, in search of the three r's of revenge, renown, and reaction. The whole Dostoevsky-thing struck me because of the statement about people willing to sacrifice their lives instead of dedicating their lives to the "hard and tedious study" required to achieve some goal other than death.

It is indeed unfortunate that so many in Islam, male and female, seem incapable of the "hard and tedious study" required to make something of their lives instead of self-abnegation through suicide. And while it is bad enough that they choose death for themselves, it is worse that they choose to murder others in the bargain. As Dostoevsky notes, whatever it takes to choose life and to overcome life's painful circumstances and barriers to happiness and achieving one's life goals (in the case of the people he cites, the pursuit of truth), too many in Islam seem to lack the strength to persevere in life and to preserve life. Apparently it is easier to die and to kill--and the rest of us ought to keep that in mind when we think about phrases such as "Strength Through Peace."

Finally, Miller makes it plain in her article that we will continue to see suicide/homicide bombers because it is not yet unacceptable in Islamic societies (and, more specifically, Palestinian society) for women and men to kill themselves and others for the cause. And that's something we ought to think about too when we consider what to do about these things--and who we might elect to take action against the people who live in such societies.

AJ