Music of the Day: Paprika Soul, Rio Dawn

Once in a while, on my way back to the ranch from The Job, I get the urge for a burger, despite the grisly, gory nature of my work at the slaughterhouse. There's a fast-food joint that's kinda' on the way, so I make the stop, grab whatever I'm reading out of the back seat of the car (today's reading is Robert D. Kaplan's Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond--about which more of later) and stumble in for some pre-masticated, processed grease disguised as beef. It ain't good, but it's cheap and, as the term "fast-food" implies, it is rapidly presented on the cute little brown-plastic tray.

I love onions and I hate pickles, except for sweet Gherkins, so I always ask the server-person to (a) hold the pickles and (b) put extra onions on the burger. That is the only complicating factor to my standard order; otherwise I order by number, as does every customer at this fine, international burger joint. Hey, it ain't good, but it's cheap and fast, and so far, at least, the order numbers are all single digits, so they're easy to remember. But, lately I've had to repeat my order because the server-person wasn't able to understand my request for the extra-onions-hold-the-pickles, either that or everyone workIng there had a significant hearing problem. And then I started noticing that every employee in this particular fast-food joint, and I do mean EVERY employee, did not speak English as his or her first language.

Furthermore, change was handed to me in a lump sum with no effort to count out the change as those of us born in the 1950s were taught to do in our first-retail-job-days of yore. This is, unfortunately, not an uncommon occurrence regardless of the native tongue or ethnicity of server-persons that one encounters these days; but I suspect the reticence to count out change in this case has more to do with limited English speaking skills than any calculator-dependent math deficiencies.

The other thing I noticed was that simple interaction between me, the customer-dude, and the server-persons was nearly impossible; I normally initiate interaction with server-persons by saying something semi-friendly such as, "How are you today?" This is an automatic ice-breaker for me, and I don't really mean anything by it other than, "Hi there, I'm human, and I hope you are, too. If you respond appropriately, by telling me you're okay and asking me how I'm doing, I'll tell you that I'm average, but I'll know that we're both okay in a rudimentary sense and that I can place my order for the Number Two."

Now that I see that in print, asking for a Number Two for lunch is a pretty ghastly idea, but hey, that's what the menu says, Number Two, which is the Cholesterol-Clogger Special topped with Double Deadly Processed Cheese and served with Gastronomically Grotesque Greasy Fries and a Tooth-Rotting carbonated drink of one's choice.

Anyway, attempting to establish our mutual humanity is impossible with someone who speaks virtually no English and instead of a sunny, meaningless reply such as, "I'm good, bro, how are you?", I typically only get the sullen glare-stare which means, I think, "Order your food, pendejo, this ain't a social club, I'm busy as hell here at the counter, and soon I'll have to mop the floor, so I'm not real happy to begin with." So, I order the Number Two, get a wad of uncounted bills in return for my $20, and wait for my "food."

Once I get to my seat I open all the packages and wrappers and such, find my place in my book, and start to read and eat at the same time--but then I notice that behind the counter, the employees appear to be having a wonderful time talking to each other--in their native, non-English. There's laughter and much animation and people actually seem to be enjoying their work and their interaction with one another. Hey, that's all I was looking for when I asked the server-person, "How are you today?"--just a little interaction.

Instead of being treated like a person, I was treated like a number, sort of like the food on the menu, but this seems to have occurred out of a curious linguistic necessity; I guess it's hard to engage in friendly banter with someone whose language you do not speak, and while this is hardly a life-altering set of circumstances or something that deeply offends me, I do find it a bit off-putting and slightly rude. If I were in the Cholon district of what used to be Saigon and I was ordering Chinese food, I'd expect some linguistic challenges and perhaps some limited opportunities for banter, but not at my neighborhood McBurger joint. I think maybe I'll try to find another place to catch a quick burger, a place where English is spoken; maybe I can order the Number Nine with cheese AND have a twelve second conversation about the weather, too.

AJ

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM'S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

Music of the Day: Dexter Gordon, Confirmation

Some of you regular readers of this blog have an interest in the Vietnam War, as do I, so I now want to recommend to you an article that appears in the December 2007 issue of Commentary magazine. The piece is by Arthur Herman and it's title is the one you see above, Who Owns the Vietnam War?

For those of us who care about this long episode in American history, this is an important piece, one that I think will change the debate about the war, and will generate further study of its causes, its successes and failures, and its meaning for today's, and tomorrow's, policy decisions. Please go to the Commentary web-site, bookmarked at right, and read this article. If it is not yet posted, give 'em a couple of days and try again. . . .

AJ
To Live in Freedom's Light is the Right of Mankind

. . .my blog postings will include the following phrase:

TO LIVE IN FREEDOM'S LIGHT IS THE RIGHT OF MANKIND.

I have never been to the Philippines, but apparently that phrase, above, appears on the Pacific War Memorial on Corregidor and it is as phrase that should not be forgotten, especially given that some 17,206 American servicemen will killed in the Pacific in World War II and another 36,282 Americans were listed as missing in action. That phrase is why. . . .

AJ

Music of the Day: Ronnnie Earl, Healing Time

There's nothing like low back pain and a bad sleep pattern to foster mid-night, and midnight, ruminations on blog-eligible topics. I almost always resist the urge to get out of bed, put on the sweat pants and my AFROTC sweatshirt, some heavy socks and booties, strap the heat-pack on my lower back, and stumble into the library to write. This resistance is a good thing because I know full well that staring at a computer screen in the middle of the night is probably bad for my asthenia; and there's the issue of not being able to get back to sleep after bashing away at the keyboard for an hour or so. So it was the other night, at about 1:30am, when something awakened me long enough to think through this process and to once again resist the urge to get up and hammer away at the keyboard.

But the idea that popped into my head that night lingered at the fuzzy fringes of my mind, so here I sit at the laptop this fine, chilly, Sunday morning, after having seen Dr. Phil and his wonderful family and some friends for dinner and such last evening--it's time to put words to ether. . . .

As for the title of this piece, I have a suspicion that most of the folks who read this here blog-screed are Us and not Dem(s), although there's much room for error in that idea. I know there are some Independent-types who read this, the occasional Libertarian, and some folks who, with weird-sleep-patterns like mine, cannot resist getting up and staring at a computer screen in the middle of the night, regardless of what bizarre ideas might appear before them.

So, who is Us [or should that be, who are Us]? I don't know about all of the readers of this blog, but Average Joe comes from a family of FDR/New Deal-Dems and union-types; Average Joe admits to having registered as a Dem in 1971 when he became old enough to vote (21 years old, in those days), and voted as such, once for George McGovern (the shame!), once for Jimmy Carter (the ultimate shame), and after that for a Libertarian candidate or two, and finally for Republicans, although not for Bob Dole for some weird reason. That makes me a Republican in terms of voter registration and, more importantly, in terms of world-view. My Dem-past came to an end in the Carter administration; those of you who read my postings know that the so-called "malaise" speech Carter gave is one of the things that pushed me out of Dem-land and into Libertarian-land, and finally into Us-land. Another thing that pushed me towards Ronald Reagan was the Iranian hostage situation and the Carter administration's fecklessness with respect to that situation.

All of that leads me to what woke me up in the middle of the night earlier this week; there is, I think, a demonstrable difference between Us and Dem(s), and that difference is mostly attitudinal in nature. To wit: What I hear Dem(s), and mostly Dem-pols, and media-whizbangs (themselves mostly Dems) saying is that when things are good, they are bad, but mostly things are really bad--America is bad, the American military is bad, our policies, both foreign and domestic, are bad, we've made the environment bad, our history is filled with bad and mendacious men who did really bad things, our economy is bad, capitalism itself is bad, our "culture" is bad, authority is bad, the desire to be safe and secure is bad, Fox News is bad, Rush Limbaugh is bad, people in business are bad, Christians are bad--you get my drift. You can make up your own list or expand this one, I'm sure.

Here's what I think about Us: Republicans know that not all business-people are ethical and that they sometimes do bad, unethical, reprehensible things; we know that our history is a story of great triumph, such as the abolition of slavery, and great tragedy, such as the often shameful treatment of American Indians and others; we know that the economy is not perfect; we know that having clean air and clean water and having more fuel-efficient and cleaner cars comes at great cost, they don't just happen because they are good ideas; we know that the men and women in the military are, as noted previously here, reflective of our society and culture, which means our military has all of our strengths and weaknesses and warts and beauty marks; we know that the same culture that has given us Marilyn Manson and Charlie Sheen has also given us George Gershwin and Louis Armstrong; we know too there will always be a Jim and Tammy Fae Baker to thump the bible and then systematically ignore its teachings. And despite knowing all these things we still don't think America is bad, not the way the Dem(s) think America is bad. We still have hope for the future and for our children and our grand-children; we still think their lives will be as good, or even better, than our own--how one defines that "better" is, at bottom, an individual assessment, but we still have hope. We still think America is the last best place on the planet, regardless of our failings (many) or our shortcomings (many) or our prejudices (many) or our ignorance (much) or our short-sightedness (frequent) or our impatience (often). We also know that there are dangerous people in the world who would like nothing better than to kill us in large numbers, but despite that knowledge we get up in the morning and go to work and raise kids and read books and play tennis and ride motorcycles and fly airplanes and go to church and watch movies and do all of the things that one might call "being normal."

What I think this means in terms of my vote in 2008 is that I cannot in good conscience vote for someone in a political party whose world view is so opposite of my own, someone who claims to love America, but who cannot see or appreciate or utilize the virtues of its free, unfettered citizens who are engaged in the chaos of everyday life, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, but always striving. Those who see doom and gloom on the horizon, environmental doom, economic doom, spiritual doom, unmitigated doom in all its forms, and nothing but doom, do not appeal to me in any way.

Interestingly, these same doom-seers apparently do not see, or choose to ignore, the potential for doom from what I think is its greatest current source--mad-dog Islamic fundamentalists with nuclear weapons and delivery systems and the will to bring some level of doom to our shores again.

So, when it comes to down to Us v. Dem(s), I gotta' stay with Us and not Dem.

AJ

Music of the Day: Beethoven, Coriolanus Overture, Opus 62

Every now and then I come across a book, usually by accident, that strikes me as being intensely important, a book that I have to loan to everyone I know, a book that I recommend for purchase to those who are too far away to take part in Average Joe's Lending Library program. This year, I have come across a couple such books, the most recent of which is Robert D. Kaplan's latest offering, a 2007 publication entitled Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground. I haven't read anything else by Kaplan, although I have purchased and begun reading his 2005 book entitled Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military from Mongolia to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond.

But, back to Hog Pilots; one of the things I like best about this book is Kaplan's focus on the men and women who are at the business end of policy--Special Forces guys, the sailors on the Navy's surface ships and submarines, the pilots flying close air support (CAS) for infantry troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. This adheres closely to my personal academic bias and interest; when I began studying the Vietnam war in earnest, I focused my research and reading on the grunts, the ground-pounders, the men who fought the war in jungles and mountains and the Delta and the streets of Hue and elsewhere, the POW's, those who came home bloodied and battered, the survivors, the successful, the wounded, and the wrecked. The stories were more human, more visceral, more intense, and to me at least, more real and more interesting than the political- and policy-machinations of the decision-makers and generals involved. My study was more of a social history, or a literary/social history, of the war in Vietnam, as opposed to a study that focused on politics or sociology or pure military history.

In this book Kaplan takes a similar but more expansive approach, without diminishing the power of the stories about individual soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. And the "voice" is not some disembodied "objective" narrator, but a man who has traveled the world, for years, "embedded" with various units in all of the services. While I don't agree with his idea that the military is merely a part of an American "empire," (even if it is an accidental empire), there are many more things about this book that I find to be spot-on that I can overlook his notions about "empire" and the United States.

I also don't fully agree with his assessment of what might happen should democracy and liberty break out all over the world; his view is that "an age of democracy will give free rein to an array of vibrant new forces that make it unlikely America's global role will be AS DOMINANT as it is now" (emphasis added). While Kaplan concedes that might "turn out to be a good thing," I'm willing to go a bit farther. I think for most
Americans it would be okay if we were not "as dominant" if that meant other people around the world were free from tyranny and exploitation and oppression and if that meant we didn't have to worry about being killed by suicide bombers and mad-dog high-jackers in planes and by religious nuts with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. I think this makes me a bit of an isolationist, maybe even makes me a bit of a utopian, but it would be okay to be isolationist if other people are minding their own business in free and open societies; we would fight fewer wars if we didn't have to worry about others bringing war to our shores, or if we didn't have to concern ourselves with tyranny and oppression in other places.

This latter notion is not too far removed from Kaplan's own idea expressed near the end of this book, to wit: "Still, the overarching objective of the American military's imperial-like deployments should be, as I wrote near the beginning of this odyssey, to provide a security armature for an emerging global civilization, which, in turn, nurtures a loose set of international arrangements that have arisen organically among responsible and like-minded states."

Aside from all this, however, are the human stories that Kaplan tells so well, the stories that remind us of the humanity of the men and women in uniform, stories that re-affirm the personal sacrifice of the volunteers in our "warrior class," stories that remind us that people in the military are complex beings whose strengths and weaknesses mirror our own and the strengths and weaknesses of our society. This is an eminently readable and important book that makes some bold assertions about the efficacy of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), while it challenges some of the assumptions underpinning some neo-conservative views about our best policy options, but it is fairly written and there isn't a single moment of Bush-bashing in it.

Buy this book for yourself for Christmas. . . .

And have a wonderful Thanksgiving day!

AJ