DCJOct2007

Volume 46

OCTOBER 2007

46. 6: TEEN SEX, THE MIDDLE COURSE 10.29.2007

Apologies to P-P Rubens

Sex, Sex , SEX, SEX , SEX, SEX , S-E-X! There, ave I got your attention? Actually, I'm not doing anything that Madison Avenue doesn't do with us every day with commercials and advertisements. But even that stuff, which we seem to tolerate rather well, does not engage us the way SEX + Youth seems to. Then we, especially those of us with children and grandchildren, really begin to take notice, because we have a big problem with sex and youth this country, especially if we are from the political and religious right side of the political continuum. That side likes to pose the problem as one of morality, which they see as dropping faster than a drunken girl's panties at a high school after the prom party. Mostly, they see this as having been brought on by those hippie liberals who were dropping LSD and their underwear, and dodging the Draft, while “real” Americans were dropping napalm on that other country that never attacked us. Free love, women's lib, abortion rights, gay and lesbian marriage, the religious right considers them all a part of the national descent into debauchery, a further distancing from the biblical way of doing things.

So, when a middle school on Portland, Maine decides to make birth control pills and devices available to kids as young as age eleven, we can pretty much expect the walls of Jericho to come tumbling downon the heads of the religious right. he logic of the school board's decision in Maine is the same one that used to apply to sex education in general. The sex-ed rationale was that it was better for youth to know their biology, and at least they could make informed decisions. The current decision is a recognition that many youth have made decisions to have sex, apparently as early as age eleven, [1] and that it is better they be protected from HIV and teenage pregnancy. Of course, we all know the religious right's response—if you tell youth about sex and show them how to use condoms and such, you are encouraging them to have sex. To them knowledge equals action, which does nothing to explain why and how ignorant people seem to have higher rates of unwanted pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases.

That argument is not going to be settled anytime soon. The Religious Right may know their scriptures, but they don't know the sociology of their Bible very well, and they certainly don't know much Sociology at all. If they took a look a biblical history as much as they do to the scripture they would realize that the “youth” of biblical times were already engaged in sex by the age today's youth are in junior high. Even today, in many undeveloped countries that remains the case. Girls in Nigeria might marry by age 11, and have children shortly thereafter.

In developed countries the major difference is that youth go to school, often from age five to age twenty-five. Consequently, they are economically dependent upon their parents during those years, a circumstance that places them in an ambiguous social status between youth and adulthood. Yet, their biology is no different from what it has been since biblical times or what it is for Nigerian teens. So, in Maine, by age twelve or so, their bodies are telling them that it is time to start having sex. But in Maine it is also an age at which their parents are telling them to turn off their iPods, clean their rooms and study for that algebra exam. This “in-between” period of life, one that in many respects is a creation of the latter half of the 20 th century, became the “teenage” and brought with it new, but largely unanticipated, challenges and problems. Among these has been what to do about “kids” desiring to have sex or, put another way, wanting to be “adults” when socially they are still regarded as “kids.”

Like many new social challenges to humans the reaction has been varied, and often neither very intelligent nor effective. Most recently, living in the age in which religious authorities have undue influence upon social policy we have seen the downright silliness of the religious right. Hundreds of millions in George Bush's “faith based initiative” moneys have been expended on school programs to get kids to “just say no” to sexual intercourse and pledge themselves to celibacy until marriage. There is probably no way of verifying the extent to which these pledges are being honored; but there has been at least one curious response. There have been reports of large increases in oral sex among teens in various parts of the country. The International Herald Tribune reported in September 2005 that “ . . . oral sex is very much part of the teenage sexual repertoire. According to the survey, more than half of all teenagers aged 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex - including nearly a quarter of those who have never had intercourse.” Oral sex, it seems, has become parsed out of the “sexual intercourse ” equation. If reporting by some teens of behaviors in a Massachusetts prep school (where they should be taught to be more facile with the language, shouldn't they?) young women, referred to as “ dirty pretty things," are performing Lewinsky-like services on their male classmates with not more emotional attachment than would a handshake. So, in much the same way in which Mr. Clinton questioned what sex “is,” some youth might be consigning oral sex to a category outside the definition of “intercourse.” What irony that a man so despised by the morally righteous might have provided a technicality that allows the intercourse pledge to be “honored” but does not spoil all the fun.

This is not leading to a blanket endorsement of the Main Middle School approach to the realities of biology in the 21 st Century. Teenage aboriginals lived in far more simple and otherwise socially regulated societies that do today's young people—and they die and continue to die at much younger ages. For many, life was, and is, “nasty, brutish, and short,” and there is not much time for the honeybee to visit the flower. The answer might not lie in giving in to the “human sexual response,” but neither does it lie in moralizing on human behavior from scriptural references that clearly disconfirm their anthropological relevance.

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[1] Man, that does seem early.

46. 5: ARE WE DONE HERE ALREADY? 10.21.2007

Could we be on the edge of an amazing convergence of faith and reason; one that we never could have expected? Could Al Gore, the new, if second, environmentalist Nobel Laureate, and some Reverend Numbnutz be on the same page? Is the ‘times they are a changin' catching up with the End Times? Oh, Lordy! The Second Coming of Jesus just might be going to coincide with the Next Melting of the polar ice caps.

So the question is: Are we done here, already? Environmentally, or eschatologically, or both? The dinosaurs had a couple hundred million years. Do you mean we aren't even going to make it to a million?

Political opinion surveys are showing that over 60 percent of Americans are fearful of the consequences of global warming. That is a big jump since the beginning of the Bush disaster. While people are still concerned about terrorism they are beginning to wonder whether we might not be terrorizing our own planet. They are beginning to be concerned that an “orange alert” might not mean that that big orange disk in the sky is raising sea levels that destroy coastal cities, creating endless drought, spreading diseases, and generally spelling the end of civilization as we know it (which is not very well). Before Osama bin Laden gets at us we might already be drowned or desiccated by our old friend Helios.

The Endtimers have their own, scriptural, view of all of this—the great Armageddon is upon us at last. As they see it, they great battle between Christians and Muslims is already under way and, after the infidel is vanquished, the next step is to convert the Jews (and get back control of the media and banks, of course), and all those who have taken Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior will be sucked up into the heavenly cumulus. Oh, Lordy!

However, there is the scientific view of things, which just might beat out the endtimes scenario. That one relies on simple, mathematical function—the coefficient, or exponential function. The problem that exponential functions often present is that they can sneak up on you. For a while we were getting prognostications from scientists that global warming would begin to render significant effects more toward the end of this century, that is, well beyond the final payments people are going to make on their Hummers and monster pick-up trucks. So why fret about it; keep on guzzling and leave it to the next generation that is going to be paying “out the whazoo” for the Iraq war (assuming it is over by the end of the century.) [1]

But now these pesky scientists have brought up this exponential business and are using terminology like “tipping points” and “points of no return,” And these scary occurrences might arrive within a decade or so. When they happen there won't be much of anything we can do to remedy or reverse our dlide down the greasy chute down to the ecological “endtimes.” Those believers in the eschatological endtimes have imagined themselves awaiting their heavenward escalation from mountaintops, but they may be seeking such perches just to keep their feet dry.

So here is sort of how I understand the exponent effect. First, take snow, the stuff that covers those polar ice caps, and places like Greenland. Snow is white, and we all know from what color we are wearing—black or white, that a white shirt reflects the sun's radiation and keeps us cooler. The black shirt absorbs radiation and warms us up. So, as the greenhouse effect melts the amount of snow, more of the darker soil and rock are exposed (the Greenland effect) and the temperature gets an extra boost. The mean temperature rises.

Second, and related, earth scientists have discovered that the ocean seabed contains huge amounts of methane gas that remains trapped there as long as the water temperature remains cold. Methane is a major greenhouse gas. [2] However, as the mean ocean temperatures rises this gas will begin to escape, rise and enter the atmosphere, adding to the greenhouse effect and, as we are not beginning to see, the multiplier, or exponent of this process.

Third, as these processes result in a furtherance of desertification and the depletion of the rain forests—which are natural processors of CO 2 and expellers of oxygen—the overall effect of global warming is yet further exacerbated. So the very process of warming promotes yet more warming, and the pace of warming accelerates. This means that the potential catastrophic effects of global warming may be far more imminent that we had previously projected. Since these processes re-enforce one another the likelihood of “tipping points” of irreversibility being reached within a couple of decades is enhanced.

What the effect of all this warming will be is grim. The consequences of the diseases (such as the advance of malaria into northern latitudes, as just one example), the famine resulting from crop failures and species extinction and other animal die-offs and, to make quicker work of it all the wars that will result from the competition over resources and the enormous population movements, can sum up to no less that the extinction of humankind.

This is difficult to imagine for the species that has arrogated to itself the central position and purpose of creation itself. This is where belief enters into the equation. How can there be a God of creation who would accept as his heavenly companions for eternity, such a bunch of selfish screw-ups as the questionably named homo sapiens sapiens ? Perhaps the answer to that is that the religious Armageddon will spare us the ignominy of choking to death on our own effluents. But I'm being too optimistic.

But is there a less biblical answer? Is there a chance what seems to be emerging as a self-exterminating course can be reversed? Not if we consider how geo-politics has operated thus far. Despite the numbers of Prius's, windmills, re-cycling and other measures, the developing countries will add nearly 20 percent more CO 2 to the atmosphere by 2010. Although Americans are the biggest per capita polluters in the world, the sheer number of Chinese produces nearly seven times the volume of greenhouse gases, and its growth rate promises to add the equivalent of “another present-day United States to the climate system in little more than a decade.” [Foreign Policy]

Are we done here, yet? Things don't look promising. And why is there all this sudden interest in colonizing Mars?

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[1] Yes, I realize that global warming is caused by more that Hummers

[2] Large amounts of methane are also already emitted into the atmosphere out of the back ends of ruminant farm animals, like cattle. The amount of this flatulent gas that is emitted from Republicans is yet to be measured, but is frightening.

46. 4: THE GOOD WOMEN OF CHINA, by Xinran, 2002, BR 10.15.2007

This is the second book I have read by Xinran, a Chinese woman journalist and broadcaster who now lives in England. The first one was about just one Chinese woman, a doctor who went looking for her husband, also a doctor, who was sent with troops into Tibet in the early 1950s. Forty years later, after living with nomadic Tibetans she discovers that her husband had been killed in the fighting between the Chinese and Tibetans and had, because he performed heroic medical deeds, been given a “sky burial” [1] by the people of Tibet.

Xinran began an even radio “call-in” program in Nanjing in 1989 called Words on a Night Breeze that became something of a phenomenon. Her book is subtitled hidden voices. Despite a title that sounded more like a poetry program she began to receive a growing torrent of communication from women all over China. They told her their stories, pouring their hearts out to s stranger who was often the only person to whom they had ever confessed their tormented lives.

While the Maoist revolution had changed the social position of some women in China, the vast majority of tem remained trapped in age-old traditions and social pressures that placed tem in a subordinate status to men, socially, economically and politically. In a nation that is eighty percent rural, women are part of a system that makes them not only workers on farms, but also those who must conceive and bear the next generation of workers. Despite the central importance of their gender, females are held in low regard. Sons are treasured because they carry on the family name and, importantly, remain in the family to see to the care of their aging parents. Daughters who marry leave the family home to become what amounts to servants in the homes of their mothers-in-law and can only improve their status is they can bear sons for their new families. Hence, they are seen to be of little or negative value when they are born and many are immediately killed or abandoned.

In one of the stories Xinran relates that, even during the revolution, women were expected to demonstrate “The Three Submissions and the Four Virtues.” These consisted of “submission to your father, then your husband and, after his death, your son.” The virtues were fidelity, physical charm, propriety in speech and action, [and] diligence in housework.” The revolution created more equality between women and men, but the social habits of a thousand years leave a residue. Part of that residue is of a society that is still, despite giant cities of millions of people, dominated by rural and village culture with anachronistic customs, mores and superstitions. The author relates a story of a workmate who “adopted” a child that she represented as hers by birth. When another workmate gave birth to her child the workmates were invited to the hospital to visit the new mother and see the new baby. But the adopting mother declined to go because of the superstition that a new baby that is looked upon by a woman who has never given birth herself will bring that baby bad luck. Since she had “adopted” her child she had not birth a child. Keeping her pretense that her child was indeed hers prevented her from going and ruined her relationship with her workmate.

The Good Women of China is speckled with proverbs that that do not bear well on women. One says that a man who beats his wife is “putting his house in order.” A saying of Confucius is that “lack of talent in a woman is a virtue.” Another, more ambiguous, is that “there is a book in every family that is best not read out loud.” [2] This may be the reason that many women endure mistreatment and rape in silence because their bringing charges will cause the family to “lose face.” In the story of Hongxue, a young girl who is repeatedly raped by her father, even her request for her mother to protect her is denied. To escape the girl makes herself so ill that she has to be hospitalized. The girl is so lonely that she keeps a fly as a pet and even keeps it after it dies. She does make friends with another inpatient who commits suicide after she is released. After her family tries to have her returned home, and thinking that she has caused her friend's death Hongxue kills herself by mashing her dead pet fly into an open wound.

Bizarre as that might sound, suicide is the only way out for many of the good women of China, especially in villages and rural areas where they face the typical future of going from being the property of their father, to that of their husband, and the abused servant of their mothers-in-law, especially if they fail to bear sons. Since, when women marry, they go to the homes of their husband's parents, there is little wonder that female infanticide and abandonment is still practiced in China. To incur the expense of raising a girl is a bad investment, especially when children are expected to care for their aged parents.

These days, with the one-child policy in effect, male offspring are even more precious. Owing to these factors Chinese demographics have been getting out of balance between males and females. They time may be nigh when females will increase in value do to their rarity. However, females may find that of little advantage in rectifying their historical low status. In one story she investigated Xinran herself was surprised to find in the town of Shouting Hill on the edge of the desert the social practice of one wife being shared by several husbands. Often the husbands are brothers and children do not know who fathered them. The term employed by the husbands when they wish to have sex with their “wife” is that he wishes to “use” her. Yet these women have no rights of property or inheritance. The verb seems apt.

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[1] Sky Burial is the title of that book, and refers to a “burial” where the deceased is dismembered and allowed to be eaten by vultures. This is also practiced by the Parsis, in India, where the place their deceased on Towers of Silence, to also be eaten by vultures, although dismemberment and pulverization of bones is no involved as it is in the Rivet form. This practice appear to be of Zoroastrian origin, at least the Indian version.

[2] Xinran herself often repeats Chinese proverbs and social thought. At one point she says that she believes that “lying shortens one's life.” (So why is George Bush still around?)

46. 3: TORTURE? WHAT TORTURE? 10. 10.2007

By now it should be well known by the lucky readers of these erudite pages that Dragon City Journal has little more than contempt for George W. Bush and his minions. Nor are we are not very big on the idiots (read Republicans) who support him. He is reviled everywhere and, in poll after international poll, he comes up like something smelly that the world wants to scrape off the bottom of its shoe. Increasingly Bush seems more like a man who lives in his own world of self-delusion where Orwellian “newspeak” is the language of discourse between him and a tight cabal of sycophants who shield him from reality.

Bush has had public moments where he has appeared to exhibit signs of derangement, not just in his speech, but in the scowls, jerky body language, and eyes that dart and seem to stare into space. We won't speculate further on this, but rather on another aspect of this man's personality, one that seems equally as distressing for a man in apposition of such power, a power that he has sorely abused. We are speaking of what some people refer to as a “cruel streak” in the man. Elsewhere, we have spoken of his cowardice, of his being coddled through school and in his special treatment in his so-called military service. These are behavioral elements of privilege that are sometimes associated with personalities that exhibit attitudes from insensitivity to outright cruelty to others.

So, why make this indictment? Well, let's put together the b ill of particulars. We will begin with what triggered this piece; an announcement by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that he may be removing all British troops from Iraq by the end of 2008 and , that he will grant asylum to all Iraqi interpreters who worked with British forces, because interpreters, and their families have been marked for assassination and are defenseless. This contrasts with the Bush Administration's practice of leaving their interpreters hanging out there. Mr. Bush has granted only about 100 Iraqis in such danger asylum in the good ole US of A. Such a callous disregard of the safety of people who have risked their lives for America is an insult to our reputation as a country that cares about human rights. Use ‘em and lose'em seems to be George Bush's attitude.

So now we can back up a bit and recognize that we might have seen this coming. Back to when George Bush was governor of Texas, the capitol of capital punishment, where, in spite of the amount of evidence that courts tend to inflict this more on minorities and that DNA evidence should be used wherever possible, George kept the lethal chemicals flowing in those arms. He has never showed signs of doubt or regret.

Some might object to our bringing tax policies into this, but we regard the drain of wealth in the country into the pockets of the rich and the corporations as an act of social insensitivity that borders on cruelty. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth George just doesn't see it that way. The number of people slipping below the poverty line, into homelessness and without health care doesn't seem to matter much if energy, pharmaceutical and defense profits are down.

Need a recent example of this. For the cost of five weeks of his Iraq war, we could have provided health care for thousands of children without it for five years. Bush vetoed the bill (passed with the assistance of several republicans) because he doesn't want government involved in health care (ahem, Medicare). Better to invoke a principle that even he doesn't keep when it comes to the defense industry, and screw the children.

And those damn kids better not get any diseases that might be cured by stem-cell research, George says, because he isn't going to support using stem cells, even those that are being discarded any way, from making this into a nation that tortures little cells because this sounds to fundamentalist Christian idiots like . . .

. . . Abortion. So those female kids that make it to puberty without health care had better not get pregnant—even from rape—because George is opposed to abortion under any circumstances. So girls need to go ahead and have those kids; they can get health care (including prosthetic limbs) when the volunteer for the Armed Forces. See, who says George isn't a “compassionate conservative”? [1]

We will recall, too, that George didn't seem to compassionate when there were big crises. Remember him sitting in that kindergarten when his aides kept coming in and telling him that planes were crashing into the World Trade Center? George just sat there until they flew him around for a couple days and it was time to turn up with a bull-horn for his photo op. He kept his record of cruel indifference intact with that memorable fly-by of the Katrina disaster, a whole day after he played around with photo ops with military people in San Diego. [2] Rather than getting the National Guard and other assistance to places where the press seemed to be able to access, George made excuses, and to the world we looked like Darfur with too much water, but just as much cruelty.

Finally, we come to cruelty that even a Red State Republican might recognize as such. John McCain even recognizes it; he certainly remembers it. [3] Head-slapping, [4] temperature extremes, water-boarding, Abu Ghraib—hey what's a little interrogation, when the safety of America is in the balance? Never mind that torture is not what America is about. What's wrong with ignoring the Geneva Conventions, what's wrong with torturing (ooops!) some detainees, who haven't even been charged and are kept from having legal representation and habeas corpus rights?

And where is the concern from this president for the innocent Iraqis killed by Marines in Haditha, and by his Blackwater mercenaries in the streets of Baghdad? There is no outrage at the cruel fates visited upon these people. Only denial and silence, as if they don't matter. This is the opposite of “compassionate conservatism”; this is cowardly cruelty .

Bush is correct in one thing: He claims that “American does not torture people.” He's right; he does . But if America does not want to feel the revenge for Bush's torture, it had damn well better wake up and do something about him. He will continue to deny that he engages in torture, making us all culpable for allowing him to do it. He should be impeached, but, first, maybe a little water-boarding would get him to – finally – tell the truth.

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[1] Well, a whole bunch of military people who have seen their benefits cut, for starters. But if you do get a prosthetic limb, you mjight get a photo op with the President.

[2] His appointment of (“Your're doin' a heckuva job”) Brownie can't be called an act of cruelty. Stupidity, yes.

[3] Bush was pretty cruel with McCain, too, when he was party to the dirty racial trick of implying that McCain's adopted daughter was the product of an interracial tryst. Just like daddy Bush and his Willie Horton ad in his own campaign against Dukakis. The acorn doesn't fall too far from the tree.

[4] I wrote to a lawyer friend about the Alberto Gonzales torture memos. He wrote back and said: “What's wrong with a little head slapping?” I wrote back asking if I could gently slap his head, for ten minutes, every fifteen minutes for a month. Just as a test to see if he would retract his statement. But he hasn't taken me up on it. Just gently, mind you.

46. 2: THE WAR AND THIS WAR 10.4.2007

Uncle Nick in Burma, ca 1944 ©UrbisMedia

When the fifteen hours of Ken Burns documentary of World War II is over later this week we can return to the endless Bush Iraq War that is already longer than the war that eliminated Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. The contrasts go well beyond the differences between the almost quaint citizen soldiers in their cloth shirts and tin-pot helmets and the Robo-cop, all volunteer military we have in Iraq. “Body armor?” my uncle, who fought from North Africa to Anzio, might have said, “What the hell is body armor?” The Whermacht couldn't kill my uncle, but disease did, way too early when he got back. These days over a thousand of his fellow veterans of WWII die every day. They have been called “the greatest generation,” but I think my uncle would have laughed at that; he was too close to the three smells he said he remembered from the war—“cordite, puke and shit.”

There are still enough WWII vets around, however, to pull together an audience for George Bush—the man whose idea of combat is a push and shove in a bar in Texas—to create the illusion that his war is somehow in the spirit and purpose of their war. They dutifully applaud, wearing their veteran regalia; but there are a lot of their fellow soldiers who don't and won't show up for Bush's staged shows. Maybe they are too old and too addled to make the necessary distinctions between a Roosevelt and a Bush, between a Hitler and a Hussein, between a war that was about preserving democracy and one where “democracy” is just a subterfuge to get to the oil. This August Bush told the national convention of the American Legion: "The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . .The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops. . . . I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities." They applauded lustily. They just don't get it. Sorry, but these guys are not the greatest part of the “the greatest generation.”

One of the worst things a society can do is to believe its own public relations. I believe that there are great ideas and even great deeds, but not great generations or civilizations. Human behavior is just to complex and varied for such summation. There is too much irony. The Burns documentary gets at both in subtle ways. It explores the segregated division of Nisei Japanese, composed of many volunteers whose families were still in the camps we had thrown them into after Pearl Harbor. They were one of the most decorated divisions in American military history, like the Tuskegee Airman, who could keep every bomber they escorted from being shot down, but couldn't drink from the same fountain as whites when they got home. There is a vignette of a wounded black soldier on a hospital ship off Pelilu, who is refused a haircut by a white Navy barber. There is another about an American soldier who is digging out the gold teeth of a wounded with a bayonet, but still alive, Japanese soldier (recounted by another American soldier who had to put the Japanese soldier out of his misery). Not any great stuff in these deeds. Of course, there was much heroism and many great deeds, the stuff of legend. But legends are the stuff, unfortunately, of public relations.

Bush uses those legends, and uses those old guys in their caps festooned with pins and vests with medals, as props, the way GoArmy.com and the Marines use them to recruit a generation that is more left behind and disadvantaged, or just looking for something more exciting to do than flip burgers or stock shelves at Wal Mart. There were some thrill-seekers in The War, too, but many more who had more mundane or noble motivations. There were also the propaganda films, like Why We Fight . They all didn't know what the hell they were getting into, or how bad it could be. They didn't know a good military tactic from a stupid one, they didn't know that they were often regarded as expendable, that the frame of reference for their war was far closer to “The Great War,” where waves of men were shoved out of trenches into ceaseless machine gun fire and more men would die in a single engagement than all of Iraq thus far. They often didn't know of the screw-ups and sheer carelessness of their generals until they read them after the war. [1] We lost more American's in one day on one Pacific Island than we have lost in the entire Bush Iraq War. But I wonder if we would get today's American soldiers to assault a beach like Tarawa or Iwo Jima, Omaha Beach on D-Day, they way they did in the 1940s. If the American public had to see it in the same day's news, rather than an edited cinema newsreel weeks or months afterward, would they put up as long with a stupid, senseless war like Bush's war. But at the end of The War we were rightly convinced that we were in the right and had done the right thing. Nothing here is meant to gainsay that.

Each time Bush puts himself up in front of his standard greatest generation veteran [2] background I am further reminded that it is another public relations piece for American exceptionalism that is, paradoxically, the most compelling indicator that were are anything but exceptional. We did win The War, and then returned to our racism, became greedy, complacent, materialistic, and arrogant. The so-called greatest generation was complicit in this, complicit in helping someone like Bush and Cheney come to power, and complicit in their abuse of it. There are many conclusions and lessons that can be drawn from such world-changing events as The War, and the Burns documentary could only treat some of them, as well as it did. But it is a fair conclusion to say that our great effort and its victory also resulted in the loss of our national innocence, so to speak. We won, we prevailed, and we became “the richest, most powerful nation the world has ever known,” in fact as well as by our own estimation of ourselves. But we have not used our might judiciously.

In films schools there are still courses that are called “doc and prop,” noting that the closeness between reportage and propaganda are sometimes uncomfortably proximate. To Burns's credit he tries to take the view of The War from the inductive, from the people who experienced it in the homes and in the factories, and on the battlefields, not the generals and the politicians. But, it is plain to see and hear from them that they never could quite see “the forest,” the molar aspects of The War, because they were “the trees.” There were too close to it to see it full, their heads down welding, riveting, or trying to keep from being a casualty.

So, in some sense, The War does not merit its definite article; it is many different wars, for Black and Whites and Japanese-Americans, and those on the home front. I recall when I was traveling in the old USSR some years ago coming upon several war memorials. They all were memorials to what the Russians called simply, the 1941-1945 War. I recall being in an Atomic Bomb museum in Nagasaki where the diorama on the history of what they call the “Pacific War” does not include Pearl Harbor. At the War Museum in Saigon, all the exhibits proclaim their “victory” over America. We should not think that because we can make a documentary of The War, that it is exclusively, “our” war.

For a lot of Americans, like me, the Iraq war is not “our” war—it's Bush's war and we need to proclaim at every PR event that this deceitful, cruel bastard stages with a backdrop of people who have been to war, but sadly, were just “one of the trees,” and ought to know better, that they should not make it their war, too.

Like the old veteran of The War, for whom their war has become the model of international relations and the appropriate method of its resolution, we have not progressed historically. They see the new world through old lenses. Sure, it has been said that those who do not heed history are condemned to repeat it. But those who just repeat history are just condemned by it. For George Bush to use The War to justify his war, does just that, and it is an insult to the memory of my uncles. [3]

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[1] Douglas Macarthur does not come off well at all in this documentary, closer to the self-promoting, arrogant, and self-regarding commander who was better at being his own public relations agent than a tactician. A lot of footage is give over to the Bataan Death march and its aftermath.

[2] There usually also is a good share of Vietnam Vets in these audiences, made up of the guys who fought, while their president boozed it up in Alabama

[3] Just in case you might have missed it. At the end of The War, Burns dedicated the documentary to all those who fought and died in that “necessary” war.

46. 1: MINGALARBA , BURMA, ARE YOUR THERE? [1] 10.1.2007

I had just finished saying, sotto voce, to Myo, my guide from Rangoon, that I was surprised at his candor about politics during our dinner at a street-side restaurant when, suddenly, all the lights went off. There are spies everywhere in Burma. I flinched. Myo said, “don't worry, it's just the power going off for the city. It happens every day around 8PM. That explained the large generators cranking up. They are outside all of the shops and restaurants. That's Burma.

I wonder about Myo, a very nice, gentle, man with a degree in Biology, which he can't use, who trades on his English to survive as a guide. He has written to me a couple of times, and I write back, but I don't know whether he ever gets anything. [2] I wanted to send him a computer, but he said it would be ripped-off before he ever got it. Myo was the one who showed me the pagoda outside which a thousand or so protesters were gunned down by the military in 1988, the last time these people tried to throw off the oppressive yoke of the junta that has ruled there for sixty years.

Burma is as beautiful as it is brutal. I had wanted to go there for a long time, not just because of cities with exotic names like Rangoon and Mandalay and its varied landscapes, but also because my uncle Nick had served there for over three years in WWII, fighting the Japanese. The Chinese, the Indians, and the Brits were in there fighting them, as well. But the Burmese were trying to get rid of their British colonial oppressors (a bit more on that below), and were helping the Japanese. At the end of it General Aung San came out as the country's leader, but he was quickly assassinated and it has been downhill into an Orwellian nightmare ever since. The country should have Aung San's daughter, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Aung San Suu Kyi, [3] as their president, since she won eighty-percent of the vote when elections were tried, but the junta slapped her under house arrest and there she has remained for years.

Monks, Buddhas and pagodas are everywhere in Burma. It seems like half the men are in the cinnamon monks robes (close to the other half may be in the army). There are huge pagoda complexes like the world renowned Shwedagon in Rangoon, to the thousands of smaller pagodas in the plains of Bagan. The landscape is that steamy S.E. Asian hothouse, and a ride up the broad Irawaddy, as I did from Amarpura to Mingun on a rickety river boat, is an experience right out of Conrad. But always lurking is an experience right out of Orwell. The northern jungles have some of the most remote terrain on the planet and have claimed a lot of the lives of those who thought they could conquer and hold it. [4] This is where there are exotic tribes of minorities like the Padung, [5] the Wa, the Shan, and the Karen, where women still wear those brass rings that stretch their nec, and some tribes still fight from trees and are reputed to take heads. It is where the best jade - the Stone of Heaven - is mined by slave labor the Burmese army hooks on heroin. [6]

There is the apt Orwell of his 1984 and Animal Farm. But Orwell was here as a British cop in the colonial days, what he wrote about in his novel, Burmese Days. You can find copies of Burmese Days in Rangoon bookstores, because it is very anti-colonial; but not the other two Orwell books. That is because it is as though present-day Burma used 1984 and Animal Farm as blueprints for the society. [Cf. DCJournal Archives 23. 1: Finding Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin, 2005].

In the current protests it seems unlikely that sanctions [7] will put much pressure on the ruling junta, unless China decides to put some real pressure on them. What needs to be realized here is that, one, the junta does not give much of a damn for the people and their condition. They closed their university, engage in genocide against the minorities in the north and have the most repressive authoritarian state after N. Korea. Second, the generals are quite well of, thank you. They are loaded with money they steal and get from actgivities in drugs and gems, among other things. Just last year a general blatantly spent something like a million bucks just a jewels for his daughter's wedding. There isn't any way of causing them much deprivation by way of sanctions, which will probably hurt the common people. Three, Burma is a member of ASEAN, the organization of nations for its region, but they have a policy of non-interference in one another's internal affairs. They didn't do anything the last time the junta called out its thug-army, and if you listened to a representative from Indonesia who was interviewed on PBS manage to mealy-mouth paragraphs of absolutely nothing and looking totally unconcerned, you know that nothing will come from that quarter this time. It is obvious that George Bush, and Laura Bush as well, jumped on it because it is a welcome diversion from the Iraq and domestic disasters they have created.

Much of the world it seems has been lulled by the fact that the junta really has no external enemies. It is not like Iraq or Iran; it doesn't bother its neighbors much. Their army is for controlling their citizenry. They stay off the radar as much as possible. Even changing its name to Myanmar seems to have helped; a university student asked me the other day if Myanmar was “anywhere near Burma,” and then asked what countries were near Burma. One really has to go there and experience the fear—the truly Big Brother fear—that the Burmese people live under in order to appreciate what a vicious, authoritarian police state this is. One needs to go there to understand why they would come up with an acronym like SLORC [8] as their version of “homeland security.”

Burma again emphasizes the unconcern and ineptitude of the international community in dealing with political leaders who brutalize their own people. For all the blather about human rights we let warlords rape and slaughter people in Somalia, Mugabe starve his people to death in Zimbabwe, as does kim Il Jong in N. Korea, and the Burmese junta make monks and dissidents disappear and imprison an elected leader for nearly eighteen years.

I personally had only a minor experience with the arrogance of the contemporary political leadership in Burma. A Burmese general and his wife had been passengers on the flight of the seventy-passenger turboprop I was taking from Mandalay to Rangoon. The general, a larger that average Burmese, wore military khaki, three stars on his epaulettes, and so many bogus campaign ribbons that he would have to have fought in every military engagement since the Second Punic War to be worthy of them. More likely his only “combat” was shooting democracy demonstrators in 1988. The “general” and his bejeweled, plumpish missus were boarded first, and alone. They sat in the front of the plane. However, when we arrived at Rangoon, everyone was required to remain in their seats while Mr. and Mrs. General were allowed to waddle aristocratically down the aisle and deplane first. At the foot of the stairs awaited a large bus that is used to ferry passengers across the sun-baked tarmac to the terminal. They boarded the bus and the general promptly ordered the diver to shut the doors and drive off, leaving the rest of the passengers standing with dazed looks in their eyes in the blazing Burmese sun. When I told Myo about it he showed no surprise at the behavior.

One is left to fantasizing about some finely directed missiles, or crack units of commandos, that would take out the brutish monsters that run these regimes. Unfortunately, there are no states clean enough, disengaged enough, or, in the case of the USA, smart enough, to do it. [9]

The poor Burmese will be left to being gunned down for our evening new amusement and tsk, tsks. They will likely be crushed and removed from our news attention deficit syndrome.

So I close with this poem,

In The Quiet Land, by Aung San Suu Kyi

In the Quiet Land, no one can tell

if there's someone who's listening

for secrets they can sell.

won't stand.

In the quiet land of Burma,

no one laughs and no one thinks out loud.

In the quiet land of Burma,

you can hear it in the silence of the crowd

In the Quiet Land, no one can say

when the soldiers are coming

to carry them away.

The Chinese want a road; the French want the oil;

the Thais take the timber; and SLORC takes the spoils...

In the Quiet Land....

In the Quiet Land, no one can hear

what is silenced by murder

and covered up with fear.

But, despite what is forced, freedom's a sound

that liars can't fake and no shouting can drown.

__________________________________________________

[1] Mingalarba means “hello” in Burmese.

[2] Come to think of it, I haven't received anything for some time from my interpreter in Nepal, Suresh, since the politics got rough up there lately.

[3] See Aung San Suu Kyi, Letters from Burma (Penguin Books, 1998.

[4] Stephen Brookes, Through the Jungle of Death, a Boy's Escape from Wartime Burma, 2000)

[5] From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe (2003)

[6] Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, The Stone of Heaven (2001). This is a marvelous book, by journalists who risked their lives to uncover this outrage

[7] The Bush administration's protests over recent events have a very hollow sound. A nice distraction from the Iraq mess, Bush denounces the junta and threatens pushing for sanctions. They probably couldn't give a damn, and he probably doesn't either. One can't recall his ever mentioning Burma before; they're Buddhists, not Muslims, and they are mostly a police state that torments its own people.

[8] State Law and Order Restoration Council

[9] Please don't bring up the USA in Iraq; it's about the oil, stupid.