Month: May 2013

There is a group of historical figures – Mark Twain, Einstein, Ben Franklin, and Winston Churchill come to mind – to whom so many quotes and anecdotes are attributed that it's difficult to separate the real from the incorrectly sourced from the apocryphal. With Abraham Lincoln, impossible is a better term than difficult. So many pieces of folksy wisdom are attributed to Honest Abe that he would have had to devote hours per day to clever sayings to concoct all of them. One of my favorite supposed-Lincoln anecdotes involves a dispatch he received from one of his generals after a brief engagement with Confederate forces in Kentucky. The telegram reported, "Good news, (name of town) taken, only 12 casualties." Lincoln's supposed reply was, "Not good news for the 12."

As the "official" American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to wind down, the casualties (U.S. or otherwise) drift even further from public consciousness. The fact that the wars have been ongoing for more than a decade certainly doesn't help, given the attention span of our media and the general public. As of this Memorial Day, the total number of U.S. fatalities in Afghanistan in 2013 is 53. Comparatively – nearly 4500 died in Iraq and 2227 have died so far in Afghanistan – it is tempting to look at this year as good news.
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And it is, in some sense. But it's not good news for those 53, their families, and everyone who knew them.

Whether or not the war is going well in the larger sense, there is no good news for Spc. Mitchell Daehling, 24, of Dalton, MA. He died on May 14, 2013 in Sanjaray Zhari, Kandahar when an improvised explosive device destroyed the vehicle he occupied with Spc. William Gilbert and Sgt. Jeffrey Baker, both of whom also died. Nothing that has happened in Afghanistan lately counts as good news for Spc. Daehling's widow, parents, siblings, and friends.
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There is no happy ending for them.

I do this annually on Memorial Day, and I always point out that the odds are overwhelmingly against any of us knowing the people whose names make up these casualty reports personally. I do not know Spc. Mitchell Daehling, and you don't either. We know nothing about him – whether he was a great guy or a jerk, whether he was funny or serious, whether he liked Coke or Pepsi. What we do know is that he is no longer alive. His death has an immediate cause that we readily understand – improvised explosives are a common hazard in this war, and he had the misfortune of being near one when it exploded. That should not stop us from remembering the less proximate causes – the political, economic, and social factors that combined to place him in Kandahar Province on May 14, 2013.

Memorial Day should be our annual reminder that the decisions our elected officials make and the knee-jerk reactions among the public have real consequences. The consequence, every time we commit ourselves to go to war, is that people who would otherwise be alive will end up dead.
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The costs of war are abstract for most of us, but very real for Mitchell Daehling and his loved ones.
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We hear a lot of florid talk on Memorial Day about honoring and remembering sacrifices. In my view, we honor their sacrifices best by remembering the chain of events and decisions that led to them.

Recently, Rhode Island and Minnesota brought the number of states in which gay marriage is legal to an even dozen.
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In doing so, they chose not only to thumb their nose at thousands of years of traditional marriage and the Judeo-Christian roots of American society, but they also chose to ignore some alarming evidence from the ten states that legalized gay marriage before them.

Take Maryland, for example. It legalized gay marriage in 2012, effective January 1, 2013.

As we near the end of May, we can see clearly the consequences of that decision. Take a look at these sobering statistics for 2013:

– 94% of straight married couples in Maryland have gotten divorced
– More than 7,000 man-dog marriages have been performed statewide
– In place of the Pledge of Allegiance, Maryland children now begin the school day with a three-minute pulsing techno beat
– Baltimore's Basilica of the Blessed Virgin Mary – the first Roman Catholic Cathedral built in the U.S. – has been converted to a gay bar called The Oil Rig. The rectory is now "Mouthfuls", a discotheque.

Little of the original stained glass has been preserved.
– The CDC has identified a new, more virulent strain of the gay causing locally serious outbreaks in the Baltimore-DC corridor. Initial reports indicate that it may be airborne.
– The Super Bowl Champion Baltimore Ravens are too busy having sex with one another to practice; the upcoming season has been forfeited.

The sad part about these developments is that they were so predictable. Defenders of traditional marriage warned us that by destroying the sanctity of the institution, all marriages would be weakened and made less meaningful. A society that does not respect marriage descends into complete amorality with astonishing speed. Maryland did not heed the warning; how many other states must make the same mistake before we learn?
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One thing I try to impress upon my students in their writing is the under-appreciated value of succinctness. Most teachers give a minimum page requirement for papers; I only give a maximum. I warn them that the world has a short attention span and one does not have the luxury of making a point by rambling on and on about it indefinitely.

Being thorough, in their minds, often equates to saying a lot. Being thorough without saying much is the hardest skill to learn but among the best to have.

This little lesson is hilarious, of course, because I am among the least succinct people on Earth. No one who dumps 500-1000 words per day on the internet should be lecturing others about keeping things short.
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I've made a conscious effort to improve this over the past year – particularly in academic writing, but also here – and there has been some progress. Yet sometimes I just can't find a way to be short and punchy, to deliver the blow without a ton of setup. For the past two weeks I've been working on a post that has turned into goddamn War and Peace regarding the poll in which 29% of respondents, and 44% of Republicans, agreed with the statement, "In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in order to protect our liberties."

It would be easy enough to mock the results or do the usual "Yep, these people exist" hand-wringing, but my actual thoughts on it were complex – something about the undercurrent of authoritarianism, even fascism, that we pretend does not exist in the United States. And the underlying dilemma that the United States, unlike other democracies, has never really learned its lesson about fascism as a society.

Then I found someone who did the work for me, and far better than I was. And it isn't even an Official Writer, it is a commenter from a Charles Pierce post.

30% of every OECD country polls fascist.

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That's just always been the case, for 150 years. In most modern wealthy democracies those people are afraid to express their opinions, because its commonly understood that people who hold those opinions are generally detrimental to the common good. That was the political lesson of WWII.

In the US however they get their own news channels and one-half of the political power, because for some reason around 1980 we all started feeling sorry for the narcissistic fantasists and sentimentalists that call themselves "movement conservatives," who told us they felt bad because they were left out of what they called "the Liberal consensus."

The Liberal consensus was really just an agreement not to let the aforementioned narcissists do what they do best, which is to monopolize the conversation and claim its all about *me* and *my pain* and what about *my people*, which in general prevents us from confronting actual real live reality, like genuinely poor people and genuine disasters like climate change. And we let down our guard, forgetting that these 30% always feel bad, because they really have nothing more to their belief system than a heightened sense of persecution coupled to a heightened sense of their worth. Everything else – their politics, economics, religion, sociology – is an attempt to rationalize those two basic principles: "I oughta be in charge, but my inferiors won't let me."

30 years later people in the media think they're entertaining and sell eyeballs so they give them a seat at the table, and they don't realize the fascists want all the seats and have bad table manners besides. And while the rest of us would like to pay attention to the reality we've ignored since Reagan first pretended he was President, the media and the conversation is dominated by these 30%, who refuse to give up their fantasyland, just as we should have known they would.

While we could pick nits with some of the specifics there, that's exactly what I've been fighting myself over trying to say for a fortnight.
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And this gentleman did it in about 200 words. I have nothing to add. This.