Archive for June, 2010

McCHRYSTALIZED

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Watch what you say around the office.  Especially if the office is in the Rolling Stone Magazine building.  The subject seems tired already but is too important to leave alone.  I’m already tired of hearing about it, but feel the need, naturally, to opine about it just the same.

General Stanley McChrystal owes no apology to the nation.  His reputation and achievements, unlike our President, precede him.  Still, he needed to go.  There was no question in my mind.  The office of the President of the United States simply cannot be lowered to that level.  It’s not Sean Penn blabbering away to Rolling Stone, it’s military brass.

Early on I figured it was all by design.  Perhaps McChrystal chose Rolling Stone to be sure that the President might read the interview.  It’s hard to believe that a guy this sharp wandered into that interview not knowing what was coming, or the outcome.  It’s also not hard to understand the frustration he must be feeling.  The Obama administration, which should be consulting with him at least weekly, took months to sit down with him, and even then, only the most cursory of meetings.  It must be something to be living that Hell, and simultaneously be barely noticed as important by your own White House.

The problem precedes the Obama White House though.  It began in Vietnam, really, when the waging of wars and building of strategy drifted from the hands of military brass and into the sweaty palms of politicians.  Not good.  One would think the nation would have learned its lesson.  Look…soldiers fighting for our safety and freedom have tighter Rules of Engagement than I do as a homeowner in New Hampshire.  If someone breaks into my house in the middle of the night, in any kind of threatening way, I make the rules of engagement on the spot.  We have so hog-tied our fighting men and women trying to make war not hurt, that our battles have turned into what Dennis Miller once called a “horrific dogpaddle”.  He’s right.  And McChrystal was right to fall on his sword for the good of the troops.  Already, Petraeus is talking about loosening those rules.  You know…so maybe we can win the thing and come home.

It’s funny, because I supported John McCain for President, lots of folks told me they thought of him as a war monger.  I disagree.  Who better to know what Hell war can bring than someone who endured it.  It only seems fitting to me that our Commander in Chief be someone who has seen battle.  It is the most consequential of Presidential responsibilities, sending men and women to battle.  You wouldn’t hire a Fire Chief who had never been in a burning building.  You wouldn’t ride in an airplane with a pilot who had only watched movies about flying.  People jump up and down at the notion that military service should be a pre-requisite for being President, but I believe it firmly.  I also believe, had McCain beat Bush in 2000, Iraq would not have happened, or it would have happened much differently.  War must be the last of last resorts.  As we look at the last nine years, we remember why.

It’s ironic that Obama’s first display of leadership was shown in the swift sacking of a real leader.  Hurt feelings, to be sure, and insubordination, made it a sure thing.  If only he had had the same juice for the oil spill, things might be looking a lot different in the Gulf right now.

Thank you, General McChrystal, for the depth of your service to this country.  I’m glad you’re out.  You deserve it.  Go clean up on the speech circuit now.  You’ve earned it.

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SENSITIVE CENSUS

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Though the Federal Government used thousands of Census-Taker jobs to inflate the latest employment figures, they probably forgot that the very fact that they did that actually fueled the very fire that is toasting the buttocks of those same federal employees.  A spate of recent news stories relate the various instances of aggression and just-plain violence that many Census Takers, let’s call them “CT’s”, are running into out in the field.

I was amused last winter when I read an article describing how these folks were using snow machines and four-wheelers to reach folks in the outer reaches of New England.  “Ridiculous” would be a forgiving description of the money our government spends to attain the most rudimentary information from the citizenry.  Even personally, I met a woman twice on my parents property, which sets back about a half mile from a rural road at the very end of a long, gravel driveway.  Not once, but twice, I met this woman wandering around there looking for my mother, who was out on both occasions.  I assume she tracked my wily mother down on some other occasion and got those boxes checked on that form.  Another bureaucratic success story.

I don’t understand the aversion to the form.  I find it silly, fill it out the day it arrives, and mail it back to save myself from having to endure the torrent of reminder letters, the threatening tone of which increase as time goes on, and pride myself on having saved my country money by responding to their query promptly.  The questions were not difficult as I remember.  A page or so of race and ethnicity questions, a tally of relatives currently in jail, and, I think, a demand to know more about my ice cream habits and preferences.

Still, I’m not surprised that a lot of people have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that they are not in the mood to be bothered by the government with regards to the silly form.  I don’t blame them, either, though I don’t condone throwing a steel patio set at a CT as one woman did.  Or chasing after a CT on a ride-on lawnmower.  Or allowing your large geese to freely peck a CT in a manner that recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”…the attic scene, I think.

One female CT recalled how a man had tried to drag her into his apartment.  He would be checking “yes” in the box that asks if anyone is planning on going to jail in the near future.  This same woman was one of an army of CT’s who expressed shock and dismay at the level of “anger against the government”.  Another indicator…their surprise…of the great divide between so many of us.  I, for instance, would not be surprised at all, were I a CT, to be met with angry customers on a pretty regular basis.  Surprised?  Really?  That people are angry with the government?   You’re kidding, right?

Who could be annoyed with the last several decades of American politics and government?  Forget party lines.  The “Fed” has grown into an obese, drunk with greed and power, and worst, inept, manatee-like creature that can’t seem to do anything right.  Their failures don’t faze them.  They operate without a budget or deadline and many times, without a clear purpose.  They suck from the working class and earners to support their failures and now to support non-citizens and their children, to the point where a middle-class existence, even with both parents working full-time, is becoming unattainable.  We have watched drugs and promiscuity eat through our culture like a cancer and nobody has even noticed.

A bureaucracy so inept, that it stops barges helping desperately to hinder the biblical damage being done in the Gulf, to check their paperwork and inspect fire extinguishers.  And we pay them to do this.

Yeah…this is no time in history for sensitive Census Takers.  You better be dressed in Kevlar, as a matter of fact.  And, naturally, the one pertinent question that the form may have asked…”How do you rate the performance of your friends in Washington…?”   Well…that question was nowhere to be found…but it got answered, didn’t it?

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BETWEEN GOD AND ME

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Being of Sicilian descent, it’s a given that there were Catholic influences in my childhood.  Somewhere along the line, we joined the Episcopalian tribe for reasons that are still not clear to me.  At any rate, the moment I didn’t have to go to church anymore it quickly became a memory.  I’m certainly not overtly religious at age 52, my cynicism gets in the way.  But like many people who display a reticence towards organized religion, I claim and insist that I do have a spiritual side.  I admire those who are “re-born” or outwardly Christian.  Whatever it takes to get you through the mire and still maintain some human decency is fine by me.

One of the great hurdles for me when it comes to religion is the unconditional forgiveness clause.  I see and read about too many things that are just unforgiveable.  I’m reminded of one of my favorite Lyle Lovett songs in which he despairs over a cheating sweetheart and wrestles with his inability to forgive.  It has a typical Lovett tongue-in-cheek prose.  “God will, but I won’t…God does, but I don’t, and that’s the difference between God and me…”.  Thank you, Lyle.

Our community is once again wrestling with that theme in the wake of one of the most stunning acts of arrogance that I have seen in recent years.  The decision by the Souhegan High School administrators to include in their 2010 yearbook, the pictures of two teens involved in the horrific Mont Vernon home invasion and murder.  Glover and Marks are already notorious in this community, one of them having already plea-bargained out in exchange for testimony against the other three.  One of them, though not tried, is clearly guilty of murder.  I know…I know…this is America.   Innocent until proven guilty.  And as far as the legal system and the doling out of punishment, he is.

But I’m a pragmatist and have read, as painful as it was, the legal documents that were made public just a few months after the arrests.  In the those documents there are statements made by the four that clearly indicate who did the machete work on Kim Cates and her daughter Jaimie.  It is also clear that there was, and is, no remorse.  Not even the slightest hint of it.  Indeed, just hours after the crime they were hawking Kim’s jewelry at a “cash-for-gold” store.  The details of the crime are too horrible to repeat.  The young girl was treated like trash, beaten and cut and left for dead.

Now comes the liberal elite that “administer” the Souhegan High School which is so far ahead of the rest of us that they don’t use grades, attendance is optional, and teachers are addressed by their first names.  You know the type and at this point I don’t bridle at all at the notion of calling “them” a “type”.  Yes…I’m profiling.  I’m stereotyping.  You see, at this point, I’ve seen enough of this type of thinking and can tolerate it easily when the ramifications of it don’t waft into my life.  When it affects me, then it’s a different story.

These are the same people who want easy, or no, punishment for child predators.  We should “heal” them instead.  It took a public outcry, a letter from David Cates himself, and a media frenzy to even elicit a semi-apology from Souhegan High School.  It could have been a form letter.  The usual “we gave the matter much thought and consideration” to the whining that the two boys are continuing their education from behind bars while they await trials.  One of those apologies that is deliberately vague and without passion.  In other words, a little worse than no apology at all.

While they may have given the matter deep consideration they gave no consideration to the Cates family of Mont Vernon or the memory of Kim Cates.  They gave no thought to the small community of Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, and the surrounding towns.  Thousands of people were affected by this.  The ripple effect was astonishing.  David Cates, who has shown absolute class since this tragic event, not giving interviews and doing Good Morning America with his daughter, but quietly trying to resume some normalcy for himself and his daughter, was forced into writing a letter, a painful process, I’m sure.  He is owed a face to face apology, but don’t hold your breath.

But the pictures will remain and the rest of us will just have to live with it.  But within this story is yet another red flag, another reminder to all of us who remember a different America, a different culture.  A time when people were demure, or at least knew the meaning of the word, and had less proclivity towards breaking social envelopes.  Now?  Well, now, it’s all about breaking the envelope.  Make you wonder where we are headed, doesn’t it?

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SEE SPOT RUN

Monday, June 7th, 2010

See Spot Run.  Of course, it’s only a spot if you look at it from space.  If you look from a closer vantage point, say…two or three thousand feet above the Gulf of Mexico, it’s more the size of a state or small continent.  “Spot”, for the purposes of this column, is the ever-growing oil spill in the Gulf, the result of a deadly explosion on an ocean oil rig.  British Petroleum, long known as BP, is the self-insured owner of the disaster.

Now look, I’m no tree-hugger, though as a New Hampshire native who spent a good chunk of my childhood in the White Mountains, I have a healthy respect and affection for natural beauty.  Not just our own, but the world over.  I have never been opposed to off-shore drilling, and remain so.  I am not a global warming nut or Al Gore acolyte.  I do believe that a cleaner planet is a better planet, that we should be taking strong yet measured steps to wean ourselves of the need for foreign oil, and that we are beholden to future generations to be responsible stewards of the planet for that time which we are upon it.

In a world that has an appetite for crude such as ours, accidents are inevitable.  We are only human, afterall.  But the Gulf disaster is as fascinating as it is heartbreaking.

First, the Obama administrations delayed and weak-kneed response is astonishing.  Knowing how Bush got hammered for his administrations clumsy and delayed response to Hurricane Katrina, common sense would dictate that Job 1 for the federal government in a disaster is immediate and heart felt response.  Perhaps Obama knows he has a Teflon shield when it comes to the press.  Maybe it is the deviant relationship that both political parties have with Big Oil.  Maybe he is simply inept as a President.  There is ample evidence prior to the spill that would deem that plausible.  Hey…maybe it’s not the governments job to get involved, but of the very few things that I would like to see the federal government involved in, this type of thing would be one of them.  If the company that owns the business is clearly in over their head, and pardon the pun, and the ramifications of not dealing with the problem effectively and quickly are magnificent, as they are here, then I want the feds in there with the Corps of Engineers, Navy Seals, or whatever it takes.

I was delighted to see James Carville, with whom I agree on almost nothing politically though I admire his humor and spunk, come unwound on national television telling Obama “we’re dying down here”.  And I mean he was yelling, passionate.  He’s a New Orleans native and I’m sure that has something to do with it, but still, it’s just as frustrating to watch from up here in New Hampshire.  The notion that there was no fail-safe for this type of failure, nothing on the safety checklist, is pathetic and inexcusable.  BP is everything that Captain Sullenberger is not.  Clearly no contingency plan for huge disasters on oil derricks.

And here is some PR advice for BP.  If the best plan you can come up with is shoving golf balls and rubber chips down the pipe to try and stop the fountain of crude, best to keep that under your hat.  Are you kidding?  Look, folks got no confidence in you guys as it is, but when you begin rolling out plans like that, we expect to see Wily Coyote and an ACME suitcase nearby.  Next it was spreading hay over the slick, which as of this writing(Thursday 6/10) is only seven miles from the Florida coast.  The thinking was hay would act as an absorbent and also make cleaning up easier.  It reminds me of a Three Stooges episode where Curly is trying to stop a “leak” in a bathtub.  The “leak” is the merely the faucet and he begins to add lengths of pipe and elbows, increasingly frustrated to see that the leak continues to come out the end of the pipe.  The scene ends with him completely caged in and finally drilling holes in the bathroom floor to let the water out.  I just can’t help but thing that we are approaching a similar ending in the Gulf of Mexico.

Lawyers will make lots of money.  Washington sent an attorney down there, apparently more concerned with getting the lawsuit underway than stopping the river of oil pumping into the Gulf.  An already devastated area will see their fishing industry destroyed.  Miles of coastline and hundreds of cities that rely on beach tourism for their livelihood will be decimated.  The “clean-up” will costs tens of millions of dollars and will never really be “cleaned up”.  For all the accolades about the Exxon Valdez clean-up, and how nature “cleans itself”, like a cat I suppose, if you dig down one foot on the coast of Alaska, near the Valdez spill, you will see a layer of oil.  Forever, just like a diamond.

It will be interesting and sad to watch this unfold.  Just days ago, the latest attempt, to “saw” the end of the pipe, only saw the “saw” get stuck.  It took two hours to free up.  How would you like to be that guy?  That will get you two fingers in the eyes from Moe.

A sad comedy of errors, compounded by the complete absence of a “plan”, will undoubtedly blossom into the single worst environmental disaster this country has ever seen.  They are talking August now, before the leak may be contained.  They claim to be unable to determine the rate of flow, but as Dennis Miller pointed out, this from a company that “charges me three dollars and 9/10ths of a penny for gas”.  Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

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