That's
the way I started my very first blog entry, just a bit over a year ago. The
idea came from a relatively recent translation of Beowulf by Seamus Heaney that I'd read a year or
two back. In the prologue, Heaney argues that the opening "hwaet!", which others
have likened to "listen up!", is as "So" is taken to mean in his home in the
north of Ireland. A kind of scene setter, heavy with impending import. An
exclamation point of its own, followed by a furrowed brow and a deep
breath.
As in: "So. We planted corn
in the northern field today."
The
world has moved on since that blog entry (catch that Rey?). The ending of that
first bit has a clue, that bit about Yeats - I had more poetry in my mind in
the beginning than I could carry through the course of a year, or even a month.
We've shared some personal stuff together, you and I, but most of the poetry
I've written was crafted under stress, and it's far too personal to share with
the world at large. And sharing someone else's feels like
cheating.
Forty some-odd thousand
visits and 70k page views later (according to sitemeter), I still don't know
exactly what I'm doing here. But I'm still enjoying the ride, and your company.
I like it that Tammi and Teresa can exchange views here, when one or the other's
blog is temporarily down. I like that Eric and Drew can reminisce about Paris
(they'll always have Paris). I like that in almost every case, people here can
frankly and openly exchange views and disagree politely. It's rare that someone
crosses a line here, and I thank all of you for
that.
--------------------
Did
you know that in Ireland, you can tell everything you need to know about
someone's political sympathies (at least with respect to republicanism - the
Irish kind) by whether he or she says "Northern Ireland" or "the north of
Ireland"?
Can you
grok?
Not that that's our
business.
--------------------
Business,
hummph.
Hermm, ahh. Whuf. The Navy is
my home, my beloved home - has been since I was 17. And I've made it a custom in
this space not to criticize the service. So I hope you'll take the following
only as an observation, and not as disloyalty or
opposition:
It's popular these days
for the high and mighty to come down from Olympian heights to tell us that the
Navy must be run more like a business. A business, like IBM I suppose.
This sort of thing comes and goes,
the pendulum swings. We've been through Total Quality Leadership, based on
Demming's TQM (for management) a few years back. Everyone drank the Koolaid, and
agreed that the taste was very fine, and that the after-affects were scarcely
worth worrying about. Those hairs on your palm would fall out in time, or else
you wouldn't notice.
That fad would
be followed by the war fighter pitch, full of smoke and wrath and ruin for the
republic's enemies. If only we were strong, and erect and made goal on our
retention stats. By gum.
But it's
back to business models now, and taking "risk." Accepting risk. "I'll take a
little risk on that," one hears and everyone nods, yes, risk, very appropriate.
Take some.
And the officer class is
of course notoriously risk averse, both in their personal comportment
(careerism, etc.) but also more nobly where the lives of the actual people are
involved. It's all very well and good to accept academic risk in a big office
with one's feet propped up on the desk, and another thing entirely to have to
cash that check on a rainy night behind the ship when the deck is moving up and
down through sixteen feet of motion, the moon is as absent as ethics in a
congressional cloak room, we're out of range of a suitable divert and lives
tremble in the balance. Risk means one thing on the budget line, and something
else entirely when LTJG Slippenshitz is trying to get aboard for his fifth time.
And the tanker is sour.
But
businesses, we are told, take risk. That's how it's
done.
And it feels churlish of me to
point out (to those who would listen) that, in this country, businesses fail all
the time. Every day. Sometimes more than
one.
Actual businesses, run by actual
businessmen, who went to Ivy league schools and have all the appropriate degrees
and the backing of Wall Street and the hopes and prayers of people all over the
company who are counting on this job to pay the rent. They fail miserably all
the time.
But it's generally
speaking OK, just fine, not to worry. Because businesses all have competitors,
ready, eager and waiting to fill that recently vacated niche. Just ask the Edsel
people.
And I get a little worried
when I look around the globe and see who's ready to step in and fill our niche,
should the US Navy misunderestimate the risk calculation. Because whoever else
is going to fill that gap, and it's not their fault but it's just the way things
are, it's not going to be the US Coast
Guard.
----------------------------
Because
I know you were wondering, I thought that notBush's bringing up Mary Cheney's
sexual orientation in the last debate was a pretty shitty thing to do. It's just
outside the pale, that's all.
Taken
together with notCheney's bringing the topic up in the vice
presidential debate, it smells to me anyway like a carefully crafted and
considered political move:
"Let's
talk about the veep's daughter - there's no downside: We cement good love with
our base, and potentially alienate the C-word
repugs"
"Even better - we'll just say
that they're
ashamed of their own daughter. She's fair game . This is so
cool."
No. No it's
not.
You don't bring people's kids
into it. You just
don't.
----------------------------
Saw
the Blue Angels flying at the Miramar Air Show today. Actually, I was at the REI
store just south of Miramar, and saw them in the parking lot. I'm not a big air
show fan, myself.
I used to be. When
I was a kid, I sat on my sister's boyfriend's shoulders watching the Blues fly
at Andrews Air Force Base. His name was Harrison. The boyfriend, that is. They
flew Phantoms in those days, and tore the sky
asunder with the sound they
made.
Harrison was a second
lieutenant in the Army, and he was leaving for Vietnam. I was seven years old.
When Harrison came home, he and my sister were together for a while, and then
they weren't.
The world moves
on.
When I was a kid, I saw them and
was envious. Today, I saw them and was wistful. All that you need to know about
a fighter pilot's life is encapsulated between those two
sentences.
--------------------------
You
have to admit that the editors at the Guardian have stones. I mean, writing Clark
County, OH voters from England, in the attempt to influence a US national
election, because you have to admit that the US election is more important even
than are your own elections in Europe, is a pretty bold
admission.
And if you're the kind of
paper that has a long and glorious tradition of encouraging your countrymen to
yield up their sovereignty to the bureaucracy in Brussels, well. It's brassy,
that's
all.
--------------------------
Which
brings me to my closing thoughts, on all this. notBush has managed to get the
European press behind him, by letting politics spill past the water's edge. That
was a line we didn't cross much, in the
past.
Oh sure, there was a certain
amount of disgruntled "wag the dog" rhetoric when WJC launched cruise missiles
into aspirin factories in the Sudan while the Monica thing was all the rage on
the front pages. But it was mere grumbling. No one ran for election on a "Wrong
cruise missile, in the wrong country, at the wrong time" kind of
thought-virus.
And those were just
cruise missiles. Insensate, one-way weapons of war. You'd never have to
integrate them back into society again. You'd never have to nurse their broken
bodies back to whatever approximation of health you
could.
And now we have an increase of
car bombs and homicide bombers - even in the Green Zone - over in Iraq. Because
the political campaign had discovered daylight between the president and
notBush on the waging of the war. And as a result, the ever attentive terrorist
public affairs machine has ramped the violence up, trying in their own,
inimitable way, to influence our national
elections.
Which is stupid at so many
levels, since, after three debates and stern promises to the US electorate, the
sum and difference of the space between the prez and notBush is that notBush
would do the same thing, only better. No withdrawal, no retreat, no surrender.
That's what he's signed on for.
But
perceptions matter, over on the front lines. And the enemy gets a vote
too.
And right now, Zarqawi is faced
with this calculus: The final, bloody reckoning with Fallujah is probably on
hold until after the election. If Bush wins, cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of
war. The walls come tumbling down around your Fallujah home. For better or
worse, Falluja will be tamed.
If
Kerry wins, maybe not.
Look: I know
that the war was what motivated the base on the left. I know that notBush
couldn't have won the nomination without taking Bush to task for going to war
over there. He had to do it, to have a
chance.
But the last time I can
remember a sitting president being challenged about the war we were in was in
1864.
McClelland lost. The slaves
were freed. The union was
preserved.
----------------------
Yeah,
well. That's enough.
Posted @
06:18 PM
|
Posted in
""
|
Sendit
|
Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
