A Christmas Story

In December, 1972, I was serving in the US Air Force in Berlin as part of the 6912th Security Squadron ("Freedom through Vigilance" was our unit motto) and my flight happened to pull the mid-shift, midnight to 8am, for the 25th of December. My buddies and I were drinking coffee, talking about God knows what, wondering about what the Soviets were doing, and waiting for relief in the morning. It sucked to be working on Christmas, but it was duty. It was a pretty quiet night, all things considered, because sometimes Xmas could be a madhouse. I remember thinking, as I took my shift on the search position, "So this is Christmas in Berlin."

Then the site alarm went off. This meant a perimeter penetration. Over the PA system a call went out: "ERF team to guard desk." That was the unintentionally comic abbreviation for the Emergency Reaction Force, a group of us designated to supplement the Security Police in an emergency. We hustled to the guard station where we were issued helmets, parkas, and M16s.

"Clear your weapons!" the sergeant in charge said to us, indicating a sand-filled barrel adjacent to the weapons locker.

The four of us--the ERF team alternates--looked at one another. We hadn't handled an M16 since basic training.

"Don't give them any ammunition," the sergeant ordered the airman by the weapons locker. To us he said, "What the hell are you doing on the ERF team?"

He must have known that alternate members received no training for this sort of thing. The fact was, in any case, that we were strategically useless at best, being in Berlin and surrounded by the Warsaw Pact, and an intelligence liability at worst. The best thing our own side could do during a Soviet invasion would be to blow the site up with us in it.

"Well, shit," the sergeant said to himself. Then to us, "Look, you just follow my lead, do what I tell you and don't let anyone know you really aren't armed. Let's go."

We filed out the door in a crouch, staying tight against the wall of the building. I was the third man in the line behind the sergeant and another SP. Three other ERF members trailed me.

"Hold it! Freeze! We are armed!" the sergeant suddenly shouted.

There, standing rather wobbly as if inventing a new shimmy for a new dance step, was our flight officer. Let's call him Captain Towner. He was stinking drunk. Apparently he had slipped out into the secure perimeter area for reasons known only to him.

"Now Walt, don't make a big deal about this, man," the captain said. Walt was the sergeant's first name. Walt was black, a good career airman, and had come to us from two tours in Vietnam. He was a no-bullshit guy on duty, but a hell of a lot of fun at the NCO club afterwards.

"Against the wall," Walt said, and shoved Captain Towner toward the cinder block building we had come out of. Towner barely got his hands out in front of him and banged his head on the wall.

Walt looked over his shoulder at us, "Cover him! If he tries to escape, shoot him."

"Goddamn, motherfucker!" Towner said.

"Spread your arms and legs. Do it now!" And Walt kicked the captain's feet apart. Towner, severely impaired and with his feet on ice, slid down the wall, his hands clawing for a grip. He lay on the cold ground reaching for the wall for a moment before realizing he was down.

Walt grinned at us. To Towner he said, "I told you to spread 'em against the wall! Do it!"

He reached down and grabbed Towner's collar, jerking his upper body. "Get up!"

"You fuckin' nigger," Towner said. "You goddamn spook."

"I've heard it all before, Captain," Walt said. "Now get up!"

Again Walt grinned at us. He kicked the captain in the ass. Towner tried to get up, but his feet couldn't get purchase on the ice and he flopped face down into the snow and mud again. Walt pulled out a pair of handcuffs and clapped one bracelet over Towner's wrist.

"You fuckin' jigaboo, I'll have your stripes," Towner screamed.

Walt pushed his head into the snow and cuffed his other wrist. "Heard it all before, Captain."

He jerked the captain to his feet, turned him around, and told him to squat against the wall. Surrounding him were the four of us plus an SP pointing rifles at him. Towner's eyes went wide. Towner fell over in the snow. By now we couldn't help it. I started laughing, and so did everyone else, Walt included. Towner, a good officer, a pretty good guy, and a Russian scholar, had just done something that could destroy his career, but good. But this was damned funny. It was freezing cold, three in the morning, it was Christmas day, Santa was somewhere over Central Europe, and I was holding an unloaded M16 on my flight commander with the order "shoot to kill" from one cool Security Policeman who was going to teach Towner a good lesson. Walt earned the respect of the rest of us who never really gave the SPs the respect they deserved. We'd just taken them for granted, the guys with the guns. So this was Christmas in Berlin.

Finally, the six of us gathered Towner by his limbs and trucked him back into the building. Walt had us put him in one of the day-weenie's offices and gave him a wool blanket.

"Sleep it off, Captain."

"You're a good man, Walt," the captain said, curling on the floor and pulling the blanket over himself. He was asleep in ten seconds.

We went back to the guard area, cleared our (unloaded) weapons--Walt showed us how this time--and turned our rifles, parkas, and helmets back in.

"None of this happened, right?" Walt told us, "I'll report the alarm as a system anomaly."

Now the reason I tell this story is because it pretty much covers the total drama of my battle experience during the Cold War, and, of course, at no time was I at risk of anything. It was a comic moment that made a particular Christmas as memorable as any I've ever had. But as I write this, we have some 140,000 of our young men and women at very great risk far, far away, for reasons that have turned out to be lies. They are being targeted by all sides of a splintering civil war, brought about by smashing the one power that held them all neutral and failing to fill the vacuum that resulted by responsible planning and support per the rules of war.

I could argue that my presence in Berlin in 1972 was legititimized by the very real belligerance that existed between the world's two superpowers at that time, and that a commitment had been made to keep West Berlin free way back in 1945. And, of course, Berlin was an absolutely vital intelligence asset for us in Central Europe back before modern surveillance satellite technology and things I can't even imagine have been developed since then.

But what I'm getting at are those guys, like Walt, who really did and do put it on the line in a way that few of us every truly appreciate. Every Christmas I think of Walt and the two tours he pulled at Ton Son Nhut and then all the other guys I knew who faced real mortal danger--unlike me--and now all those who continue to face danger, and more for the vanity of a single man than the security of a nation. When it is for the true security of our nation and ourselves, it is the most generous sacrifice you can imagine, given the terrible horror of warfare.

I hope that you will join me in raising a glass to all those soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and Coast Guard members who spent their Christmas not only away from their loved ones in a foreign land, but in a foreign land in which the majority of the population thinks it acceptable to kill them, and which, were they permitted to vote on the issue, would wish them all back home, just as we do. Please remember that the military is but an instrument of policy, and never the maker of policy. Please send them a prayer, or a good wish, or a care package, or tell their families that you appreciate their sacrifice. Despite the pointless catastrophe that this fiasco in Iraq is, and the total criminality of the policymakers behind it, our military does have a mission and a duty to defend us, and even obey a corrupted leadership in the spirit of keeping the military under civilian control. It is our duty ensure that never again will they be sent by some criminal civilian cabal to avenge, exploit, or oppress, but only to defend us.

It's the job that deserves our attention and thanks. To all our brothers and sisters in arms.

And the Real Criminals Continue to Run Things

Look, if it was me who was thrown into a firefight in Haditha immediately following one of my buddies getting killed by an IED, I don't think I'd be doing anything but shooting to kill anyone and anything that didn't look like it was on my side. In the confusion and chaos of combat, I cannot imagine that careful discretion is even possible, no matter how much training you've had--and we know that the vast majority of our military personnel have not received any anti-insurgency training. A huge explosion, smoke, fire, blood, and people running toward you stimulate a response that I don't believe any of us could resist. You'd pull the trigger too.

Until the policymakers who put these young men into harm's way are held as equally accountable for plopping them into a civil war in which they cannot possibly tell friend from foe in a kill zone and in which the only logical response is personal survival, then there will be no justice for the innocents killed in the war. Yet this class of criminals are still lionized by the press and asked to concoct new lies about the war.

[Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice was asked whether an additional $100 billion the Pentagon wants for the Iraq and Afghan wars might amount to throwing good money after bad in Iraq. President Bush and Congress have already provided more than $500 billion for the two conflicts and worldwide efforts against terrorism, including more than $350 billion for Iraq.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of money,” Rice said. “Along the way there have been plenty of markers that show that this is a country that is worth the investment, because once it emerges as a country that is a stabilizing factor you will have a very different kind of Middle East.”

And here are a few of those "markers" that demonstrate how stable Iraq is becoming. And then there are the other "markers," the Iraqis themselves, who seem to become stabilized by becoming dead.

So these poor damned marines are going to bear the burden for the true sins committed by the Chimpie criminal cabal--you know the names by heart by now--and when the marines are sent to Levenworth or Treasure Island to serve the terms of their scapegoated lives, Rice, Wolfowitz, Libby, et alia, will be writing memoirs about how they were poor, misunderstood, well-intentioned but misled public servants.

I certainly don't wish to deny them their memoirs, just so long as they're writing them from a jail cell in the Hague.

Now This Is a Xmas Present!

For a Cold War nut like me, the imminent declassification of government documents about our own version of the Stasi--J. Edgar Hoover's FBI--is going to be the best Christmas present ever!

At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents will be instantly declassified, including many FBI cold war files on investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers. After years of extensions sought by federal agencies behaving like college students facing a term paper, the end of 2006 means the government’s first automatic declassification of records.

Not that everything will be made available, of course.

The F.B.I., by contrast, negotiated an exemption from the 1995 executive order and concluded last year that the 2003 executive order ended its special status. It has rushed to review material, seeking exemption for 50 million pages on intelligence, counterintelligence and terrorism, but leaving 270 million pages to be automatically declassified now.

Among those files, said David M. Hardy, the bureau declassification chief, are those on investigations of Americans with suspected ties to the Communist Party. Reviewers will keep working on the exempt material to see what can be released, but it is a slow process, Mr. Hardy said.

It's a pretty good start, considering that some NSA and CIA documents will also be released. There will be some big holes, no doubt, and I'll wager that most of them will have less to do with protecting actual techniques and technologies than preventing embarrassment of still living politicians and bureaucrats.

Dr. Kissinger--if you're reading this, you may want to get down to the Bush family ranch in Paraguay while you still can.

Forecast: More Horror

I've been pretty good about laying off Chimpie recently, but today's public appearance by the Incompetent-in-Chief had me boiling.

US President George W Bush has said the conflict in Iraq will require "difficult choices and additional sacrifices" in the coming year.

The "difficult choices" are kill or be killed and made by members of our armed forces alone, and the "additional sacrifices" will also be wholly borne by our military and their loved ones. Chimpie will neither make difficult choices--indeed, he has deferred those so that a few dozen more Americans can die first--nor will he suffer any sacrifices, nor will his family, friends, bootlicking followers, fellow incometents, criminals, enablers, and dupes.

Here's what the Decider revealed in todays conference, according to the BBC:

He gave no clues as to what he had been told by his military advisers, nor as to what a new strategy might look like.

The president seems to be all but ignoring last week's report from the Iraq Study Group.

A source close to the administration says Mr Bush was angered by what he saw as the report's negative and harshly critical tone. The report, said the source, "will not provide the architecture" for a new Iraq strategy.

Isn't that heartwarming? The Decider isn't deciding, but he is exhibiting the wonderful consistency of becoming petulant whenever anyone--including his father's handpicked interventionists--point out that he has not only erred, but created utter catastrophe on a scale unimaginable in 2001, and I'm referring to the Saturday Night Live skit at that time in which a map showed the Great Lakes on fire and Will Farrell's Bush admitted, "Even I know that's bad!"

Who the fuck cares if Bush is angry at the ISG's negative and harshly critical tone? Is he so insane that he expected a pat on the back and hearty "Hail fellow, well done, Sir!" for his performance? We are currently witness to Republicans on prime time television calling Bush delusional, and yet he is still accorded the courtesy of a platform upon which to exhibit his madness. How many more die because he doesn't like to be criticized? How much longer is he going to hold his breath and make no decision because Jim Baker and friends were mean to him? When is someone going to step up and move to remove this dangerous maniac from his position of power? Can the Congress not find the will to publicly exclaim that what has been happening in this country far exceeds lying about a blowjob from an intern, and therefore deserves, no, demands and requires impeachment and removal from office?

Bush is dangerous and delusional. Why is he still allowed to command the nation? Even now that the Chimperor has been shown indisputably not only to have no clothes, but no sense, no desire to make good on his mistakes, and no condition that does not reflect a definition of sociopathy, he is still given deference by members of the press, the legislature, and the pundits in a giant Kabuki theatre that ignores that every day death and dismemberment is visited upon people whose only crime is to live in the wrong place at the wrong time or volunteer to serve an office that has somehow been commandeered by an incompetent, incurious, incapable, and incurable idiot.

Merry fucking Xmas.

Back from Winslow to Welcome ex-CIA Dude as SecDef

La Posada was a fine place to stay and the dinners in the Turquoise Room were transcendental. Thank heavens I'm not so rich as to eat like that all the time, because I'd be suffering gout and have to purchase an entire new, larger-sized, wardrobe. Winslow itself has a few hopeful businesspeople with some very nice establishments along the main drag, but the town is frankly desolate and rather depressing. It's too bad, really, because walking around it's possible to imagine it as a vibrant, high desert escape for Phoenicians and as an interesting historical destination for people headed cross-country. Sadly, an atmosphere of loss and desperation hangs over it.

My money's still on Berlin.

Meanwhile, Bob Gates has become the new Secretary of Defense, echoing Russia's penchant for shifting former KGB officers into policy positions in the executive branch. In strategic and operational terms, I have to applaud this move for two reasons. One, the obvious one, is that it finally jettisons the dessicated carcass of Donald Rumsfeld along with his atrophied brain which managed to direct US Special Forces to thwart not Al Qaeda operations but rather those of our very own CIA. I would assume that Mr. Gates will be able to straighten out or fire the remaining incompetents at the Defense Department responsible for such idiocies. If nothing else, he will be able to establish contacts within the CIA so they can be warned in advance of potential Rumsfeld-legacy disasters-in-waiting.

The big question, of course, is if Gates is the real hitman for the Baker Commission, aka Iraq Study Group, since he was a member and is now in a position close enough to Chimpie to put the knife in, figuratively speaking. Is the plan to have him spike Chimpie's bedtime hot chocolate with something that will unhinge him even further so we will all witness the on-air meltdown that will trigger a popularly supported coup against Chimpie and Cheney?

Farfetched? Perhaps. But with Bush's continuing refusal to even give lip service to his father's handpicked intervention squad, I imagine that they are to the point of reaching for some kind of final option, and a CIA man at DoD is positioned perfectly to supervise the takedown.

If I'm right, you all owe me beers--Pilsner Urquells, please.

Is Winslow, Arizona, the Next Center of the Art World?

This is what one of my friends on the faculty at the local university claims. After all, Winslow has some art galleries now, and a coffee house, a wicked railroad ambience (90-100 trains a day come through and it's a BNSF crew change point) plus a restored Mary Colter-designed hotel from the old Harvey House days. It's cheap as hell to buy a house, and it's right off of Interstate 40, and it also enjoys the income from the most lucrative industry in 21st century America--a prison. In other words, jobs for artists while they wait to make the Big Time. It also has an underutilized airport. Can you say "speculation"?

So I'm off to investigate. Pampering myself at the restored La Posada Hotel, I'll be ranging through and around Winslow for the next three days to see if it indeed the future center of all things arty. I'll be reporting from the field if--and this is not yet assured--there is some wireless access available. I'm also planning on outlining the second of two novels, the first of which is actually in work, amazingly enough. Both involve Berlin, intrigue, and plenty of sex, violence, and substance abuse, not to mention pornographic descriptions of food.

Now why have I been laying off Chimpie these last days? Well, if there's anyone left who is (a) not horrified at his presidency and/or (b) unaware that he is a delusional twit, such persons are as delusional and at this point unreachable by any means short of electro-convulsive therapy. He's just too easy a target. When his father's own handpicked board of intervention cannot sober him (and do you hear any more discussion of the Iraq Study Group less than a week after issuing their report?), and Chimpie cannot recognize the cover it provided him to extricate some shred of positive moments from his apocalyptic legacy, it won't be long before the mobs with pitchforks and torches are storming 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Full-on raving before national TV will happen within 45 days, I predict.

Okay, off to decadence in Winslow. Wish you were all there.

High Tech Wimp

If you've been wondering how it is I can post three times in one day and then not again for a week (all one or two of you out there), my excuse this time is a crapped-out cable Internet connection. The service had been degrading for some days, but I think I just couldn't face it because it meant dealing with the dreaded Cable Company. Then my connection died completely and I was stranded away from the digital world.

It's terrifying.

Worse, I actually had some responsibilities to attend to that required the Internet--no, Mr. or Ms. Wiseass, it wasn't my daily porno review. I actually mentor a grad student in writing and had a paper to return to him, I've found a lovely part-time job (I love semi-retirement!) and needed to fill out some forms, and yes, I wanted to look at some porn, although it was guitar porn over at Elderly Instruments. Okay, and maybe a little skin, but just a little. And, worst of all, my faithful and less-than-faithful blog readers (I guess that might get us up to three or four) would be left Olafless. Talk about terror!

Of course, I kept trying my connection in the hope that it was only a momentary glitch, a gremlin in the line, a mistyped login, something other than an actual outage. Like the rat in a Skinner box pressing the lever helplessly long after the experiment is over, I kept bringing up browsers, mailers, even pinging IP addresses, fer Chrissake. It's humiliating and oddly common behavior among those who now live and die by the Internet. I can take the loss of telephone service (in fact, I welcome it), or an electrical blackout due to thunderstorms or high winds, or even a broken automobile, but trying to get cable service is something that I dread like a Protestant in Spain dreaded Tomas de Torquemada.

It didn't help that the first five times I called, the Cable Company automated call center cheerfully invited me to try their new digital phone service before dropping my call with the rapid beep-beep-beep of a non-existent number. The fourth and fifth times it actually exhibited the intelligent sadism to place me on hold for five minutes before throwing my call away. So I gave up and headed for a local Internet coffee house.

As if hounded for my sins, alas, no connection was to be had there, either. I asked the barrista if I had the right password to their wireless service and she said yes, but they'd been having some problems lately. Uh-oh--now I was certain that it was a server farm meltdown somewhere out in Cable Company and they were not going to respond to anybody.

One last refuge--our local university at which I maintain my faculty status by a slender reed. If I could only get onto their wireless network. I had to scrounge 75 cents to pay to park (my tag expired in August, and I ain't paying no $200 for the privilege of unlimited parking), but beneath the dog hair, dried mud, dessicated buggers and broken sunglasses I found two quarters and a dime, enough for forty minutes. Thanks to a helpful library employee, I gained access to their VPN and discovered, to my horror, that critical emails were flying at me from all directions. I became a man possessed, clattering across the keyboard like Nijinsky on the stage in St. Petersburg, flinging answers, references, recommendations, referrals, rejections, and reverences to all points of the globe.

Finally, there was nothing left to do but return home to make The Call.

I got through. The tech support ran tests to my modem. A repair person would be dispatched in an hour. Sure, I thought as my teeth gnashed at the malicious twisting of my hopes.

He showed up. He replaced all the cabling, the box, the interal connections, everything inside of thirty minutes and was gone almost before I could tip him in my elation.

So now I'm back, and I have to confess that the boogie man turned into the good guy in the white hat. I love the Cable Company again, and I'm sorry I ever thought those terrible, nasty, unfounded things.

I was really, really wrong. Maybe I should try their digital phone service. Or are they just messing with me to get me in a big sting?

Iraq "Study Group" Report=="Decent Interval"

Frank Snepp wrote a book so embarrassing to the war criminals responsible for the long withdrawal from Vietnam that he was persecuted to keep his silence as no American before him. When I saw him speak in the 1980s, he explained how every public appearance and every written word by him was subject to preapproval by the CIA censors, and since then the Supreme Court decision that crushed his right to free speech has been an instrument used to scissor away at our protections under the First Amendment by every president since, including Clinton. Power is always trying to constrict your freedoms--Democrats and Republicans alike, although the Repugs are much more determined. You can imagine the glee with which Alberto "Torture Boy" Gonzalez has clutched this decision in his sweaty little hand on his trips to Congress.

Here's a quote from Snepp himself that is going to chill you to the bone:

The final unraveling began two years before with the ceasefire negotiated by White House National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. It got the last of the American troops out of South Vietnam, but left 140,000 North Vietnamese forces in the south. They wouldn’t get out because we hadn’t beaten them. And now they turned on the Saigon government itself…a government corrupt, inefficient, riddled with Communist spies, possibly as many as fourteen thousand of them according to intelligence estimates. A government about as solid and durable as Swiss cheese.

Substitute "Stephen Hadley" for "Henry Kissinger," "Iraq" for "South Vietnam," "Baghdad" for "Saigon," "sectarian militias" for "North Vietnamese" and "terrorist" for "Communist" and you've got a nice deja vu thing going.

The term "decent interval" specifies the time required by an abandoned ally (or puppet, depending on your view) to stand before collapsing so that the blame for the fiasco can be redirected from the Americans responsible. In Vietnam it was Kissinger and Nixon--Kissinger was terribly worried about his legacy, more than the lives of Americans or Vietnamese. In Iraq...well, you know the cast of characters, and it even includes the ghostly Henry Kissinger who has been advising Bush on how to dodge responsibility. Hank is likely finding Chimpie a very poor student, however. Nixon, for all his criminality, was a brilliant man. Take away the intelligence and what you're left with is...you get the picture. So if it's any consolation, and it won't be to the families of all who've died in this illegal war, Chimpie is going to go down with this war like Ahab went down with Moby Dick, and for the same reason--fanaticism.

You know, we really ought to elect presidents who don't disdain history. I'll let the final word be Snepp's.

The last CIA message from the Embassy declared: Let’s hope we do not repeat history. This is Saigon station signing off.

A Reason for Us to Share

If the global revolution ever comes, 98 to 2 odds are not favorable to a peaceful solution.

What would truly Christian nations do in this season of giving, I wonder? Just asking.

Another America and Yet Maybe One America

Today I joined two friends on a tour of an area of the Southwest that despite its rural nature has more gun stores per square mile than any place in America, or at least it seemed that way. We visited something like eight or nine different emporia, some quite large, others quite cosy. Throw in lunch at a fabulously cheap Mexican restaurant of carnitas so tender you could gum them and still get every molecule of flavor and I'd say we had a grand time. Yes, yes, okay, it's true: my two buddies are real Gun Wackos.

And so am I.

Surprised? Why? Because you don't think left-wingers can be pro-gun?

Here's the difference between lefty Gun Wackos and right-wingnut Gun Wackos--lefty Gun Wackos keep it on the down low. We don't put "Protected by Smith and Wesson" decals on our trucks, or glue "In Emergency, I dial .357" in our kitchen windows. We don't wear combat boots and we don't bray in public about the arsenals in our basements or what bad asses we are. We don't cut the sleeves off our t-shirts and we don't drink that piss that passes for beer in this country and then demonstrate our power by crushing the thin aluminum skin. We don't particularly care for magnums when a Warsaw pact surplus round and breath control can make all the difference.

Not that I would paint all right-wing Gun Wackos with one brush. In fact, shocking as it may seem to read on this blog, a lot of them--in fact all of the people we talked with and dealt with today--were as nice as can be. Many are thoughtful and intelligent, even if we are completely at odds politically. Although Ann Coulter has her picture prominently displayed as the bony pin-up of the onanistic right, and "Hanoi Jane" Fonda's picture is posted in the urinal, and the attitude toward the disaster escalating to total armed apocalypse in Iraq is "complete the mission," and the characterization of liberals is hysterically narrow ("Annoy a liberal--work, succeed, enjoy life")--despite all of that, here we were in polite commerce and jovial conversation with people who might well brag about wanting to blow our brains out if they could read our minds. Politics never came up, as if we could smell each other's antipathies or assumed unanimity of opinion. Anyway, here was common fucking ground, man! Guns!

Let's face it. Guns are cool.

And liberals--who can be very cool--lots of liberals, lots and lots and lots of liberals own and enjoy guns...quietly.

So consider next time that the mousy bespectacled guy in the Prius with the bumper sticker that says "Buck Fush" might well be a well-trained, cool-nerved, mightily armed left-wing Gun Wacko. He's entitled to express his view openly. Let's all be polite. Let's engage in civilized discourse. Let's act like god-damned Americans and use the First Amendment as much as we do the Second Amendment and the other eight articles in the Bill of Rights. All ten are equally important, no matter what Bush, Cheney, or Alberto "Torture Boy" Gonzalez try to do. When they're all long gone--and us too, for that matter--let's hope that those ten amendments all carry the same weight as they were intended to, to both protect the individual and the collective, and to empower them to protect themselves if that dire necessity regrettably presents itself.

Whaddaya say? Can we all agree on that, as Americans? As Gun Wackos Indivisible?

There may be hope yet for this country.

Monday Madness

Here at the homestead, I continued to convalesce, but not being contagious, I did produce a nice batch of pesto since the spouse had scored beaucoup basil leaves over the weekend. The recipe:

2 cups cleaned, dried, fresh basis leaves
3/4 cup pine nuts (or walnuts) and you can add more if you like
4 (or more) cloves of garlic, minced
1 cup fine quality olive oil (don't scrimp on this! Use the good stuff.)
1 cup freshly grated parmesan (or other hard cheese)
1/2 cup parmagiatto (or something else)
pinch of kosher salt
fresh ground pepper

I only have a pint-sized food processor, but it works pretty well with a lot of interventions. You can do it in a blender as well, but if you happened to get a full-size Cuisinart, then you'll have a really easy time.

1. Place the basil, garlic and nuts in the processor and grind away until uniform but coarse distribution of ingredients occurs.
2. Dribble in the olive oil a bit at a time between pulses on the machine.
3. Add the cheeses, a bit at a time between pulses
4. Salt and pepper to taste, but be careful with the salt--too much kills the nutty flavor.

Item number two on the to-do list was to sharpen all the kitchen knives, which is a slow, careful, zen exercise. I've got a nice selection of stones, including two grades of Arkansas stones, that make if possible to do a pretty fair job. My criteria for a finished blade is that it shave the hair off my forearm and also slice a tomato--skin side up--under its own wait, with only a pull or push by my hand.

Yes, I do clean the hair off the blade before attacking the tomatoes.

Alas, my energy now sapped, I've retreated to a rocker-recliner, slipped the lap desk across the arms, picked up the laptop, and resigned myself to a sleepy slothy afternoon of alternately dozing and sampling blogs. I must remind myself that my idyll will likely be interrupted for good by a job offer, so it is paramount that I be as lazy and nonproductive as possible until that time.

I see no gain in contributing to the GDP today. Rather than "Buy nothing day," which occurs normally on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, I proclaim this to be "Do nothing afternoon." Henceforth, the first Monday in December will officially be "Do nothing this afternoon day."

Gotta nap. Maybe a rant later. I haven't read the news yet.

The Bugs Are Coming to Get Me

I've managed to avoid the flu or even a mild cold for several years, but tonight I can feel the beginnings of some malign seasonal invasion. Unless it's more Polonium 210 poisoning. You know, I was on some British Airways flights through central Europe not that long ago.

The reason I know that this weekend will be spent drinking tea, blowing my nose, sucking down Riccolas, and watching a lot of mind-numbing television is because I have had a sudden drop in my vitriol level. I seem incapable of getting apoplectically angry. I am beginning to even feel sorry for Chimpie.

That's how I know I'm sick.

Really, seeing him raving on television has turned from an experience in fright to one of pity. Can't someone get this dude some help? An intervention, please!

Meanwhile, the spousal unit Rotkohl will defrost some of her custom chicken soup and will command me to eat of it until I get better. It's delicious and quite meaty, so I don't mind, but the trouble with soup is you can't eat it while in the supine position, which is the advantage of Red Vines and Twinkies. Oh, this damned sore throat!

Let me ask you this--if you were the intelligent designer of the universe, couldn't you come up with something better than pain to signal a problem? Oy!

Interviews--What's the Point at My Age?

This is a lost day. I've got an interview at 2:30--yes, for a fucking job--and another tomorrow morning at 9:30am. The interview today is for a part-time techie position, but I'm pretty sure they'll find it suspicious that I want to take a low-level 3/4 time slot, and I can't outright declare that I'm semi-retired. Tomorrow's interview is for a writing gig for technology crap, also part-time. They'll take one look at me and say to themselves, "This old fuck? Who wants to listen to his boring stories?"

Truth be told, I don't really want either of these, and so I ask you all--should I use this opportunity to be totally honest in the interview? You know, like when they ask me about my proudest accomplishment, I tell them about getting my boss fired for masturbating at his desk. Or if they ask about my biggest mistake I could admit that to be when I got caught stealing Polonium 210 from the nuclear lab I was working in. Never did find it, either. And as to why I want to work in their facility, I could explain the benefits of having a warm place to shit and a free high-speed internet connection, not to mention all the office supplies.

I need help here, my friends (and enemies). Let's help Olaf scorch the interview. Give him your very best advice.

Patience, My Ass

I've kept my mouth shut for long enough about the new Congress, hoping that justice would finally be served and the cabal of war criminals in the White House, Pentagon, and State Department would be summarily impeached/indicted, tried, sentenced, and our dark national legacy finally lightened at least a little. But, exactly as we feared, the Democrats are going to continue their campaign of gutless inaction. The only changes you see will be cosmetic or rhetorical, and the same interests continue to control the levers of government. When the Dems assume power in January, they will lightfoot their way around Iraq, civil liberties, the Patriot Act, etc. They won't fix Medicare, and they may well try to sell out Social Security by failing to do the one simple thing that would ensure its liquidity for 100 years or more--remove the cap on FICA from the present $97,500 per year set for 2007.

You may not care about this, but you should...unless you earn more than $97,500 per year. Here's what opponents to eliminating the cap say (from a paper in 2004, hence the lower cap):

Eliminating the payroll tax cap immediately affects the 9.2 million Americans who earn more than $87,900, raising their marginal tax rate — the tax paid on each additional dollar of wage income — by 12.4 percent. As a result, earners in the top income tax bracket (35 percent) would pay more than half of each additional dollar they earn in taxes.

Let me ask you a question--does that bother you? Do those top tax bracket folks face homelessness and starvation?

Moving on to other things that won't change, now that NBC has decided that the civil war in Iraq is actually a civil war in Iraq, it will be interesting to see two things develop. For one, the White House will stretch language to unimaginable distortions to deny the fact. This should launch a dozen dissertations in linguistics, at least. The second will be to watch the Democrats squirm away from actually doing anything to get us the fuck out of being in the middle of 5? 6? 7? factions killing each other. A ghoulish pool to start would be to speculate how many more Americans will die before the Democratic Congress finally acknowledges the idiocy and criminality of starting this war and pulls the troops out of the shooting gallery.

But they won't, because amoral political opportunists on the Dem's side voted to give this stupid monarchy of the Chimp's the authority to go to war, and that includes the Kerrys, Clintons, Edwards, etc. Any of these Democratic politicians who voted to authorize the war should be denied any attempt at the presidency in 2008, and should be constantly reminded of how they are all as morally culpable for this disaster as Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and the rest of the criminals.

Meet the new boss--same as the old boss.

Feel fooled again?

Ready for the War on Xmas?

I'm so out of it. If my wife hadn't started talking about the need to dust off our Xmas Stalk (we use an agave stalk as the centerpiece for the annual orgy of consumerism), I wouldn't have realized that we are, as of tomorrow, in the "Holiday Season." Ordinarily, this is something I dread. If it wasn't for the old Ray Conniff Singers recordings still available, I wouldn't make it through until New Year's Day, which is a day of liberation, as far as I am concerned, because I really hate the whole American idea of Xmas. And you can throw in all the other incidental holidays too, like Hannukah, Kwaanza, Festivus, etc. In fact, holidays in general are a bust, because they are now nothing more than anchors for shopping opportunities and also because they force us into celebrations and gift-giving that is neither heartfelt nor healthy.

But actually, that all changed last year, when Bill O'Reilly--yes, that mad ranter over at Fox "News"--raised all of our consciousness about the War on Christmas. At last, I thought, there's a war I can wholeheartedly support! I cleaned my weapons, bought some new ceramic body armor, and was ready to party with whoever was waging that war. As an added bonus, standing in opposition to the "War on Christmas" were the aforementioned creep O'Reilly, plus other rightwing nutfucks like John Gibson and Michelle Malkin. Talk about your convergence of enemies!

The trouble was, I couldn't find any recruiters or the army that was fighting this "War on Christmas." Before I knew it, we were into January, and as far as I could tell, Xmas had come and gone without a shot being fired or a single Santa taken prisoner.

But I'm ready this year, so I'm asking for your help. Where do I sign up to join the "War on Christmas"? Is it an official military organization, or is it still in the guerilla stages? Do I get to wear a beret with a red star on it? What are the chances of victory? Would it really be possible to one day live in a society free from drunken office parties and deadly dull family gatherings? Could I at long last live out of the sight of inflatable candy canes and dancing snowmen?

Just don't take away my Ray Conniff Christmas records. That's real.

Problem Solved!

All it took was a single comment from a terribly desperate reader in France who reminded me of how meaningless my life was. Bingo! I feel so much better now! I really, really want to thank Jimmy the Hyena Nowlan for the therapeutic post, because now I know that however low, pointless, and pathetic my daily life may become, it's never so bad that I have to stalk some schmuck's blog to make myself feel better.

Oh, and Jimmy...how do you know that previous post wasn't a lure that I knew you couldn't resist?

Gotcha!

Really, man, you make it too easy.

Black Dog

I'm not a big fan of confessional blogging. It's very popular, I know, to pour one's heart or personal life out in daily installments, and it's likely a very healing exercise for many people. Yet as extroverted as I appear to be, it's highly likely that no one who reads this who does not know me personally has even the slightest idea who Olaf Rotkohl really is (IF, that is, there is anyone who reads this who does not know me personally).

Thanks to you all who do know me and read this, even if it is as "mercy readers" who fear I'd have no readers without them--bless you.

Anyway, since returning from vacation in Berlin in middle August, and very likely starting somewhat earlier this year, I've been slipping into a dark place, finally reaching a level where I'm so acutely conscious of my condition that the awareness itself is also near-paralyzing. I write about it today as a vanity post--you can stop reading now, because (and this is doubly tragic) so damned much has been written about depression that it's just not interesting, and in a way that's the trouble with most serious health concerns--cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, for example. Unless you're afflicted or a partner of someone afflicted, it's an abstraction at best, or, if you are touched by it, it can be a profound embarrassment. No one likes to admit weakness, even when it's beyond one's control.

If there's one thing I can feel good about, however, it's that I have become pretty good at faking being a happy person, even in the blackest moods. It's probably because I'm too afraid to be rude, or maybe it's fear of giving up some advantage to adversaries, or some other stupid reason, but it's probably not healthy to wait until absolute terror fills every public encounter before seeking some support.

And I should know better--I've been down this road before, and there are treatments that can be highly beneficial. The trouble is, however, that the key fact of depression is that one cannot even imagine ever feeling like living fully again. The universe reshapes itself into a narrowing helix along which one can only spiral down further. Hope is alien. Withdrawal is the only refuge, and it only takes one deeper.

As I write this, I await the deliver of some prescriptions that have helped in the past. Due to my own failures to act in a timely manner, and partially due to an unnecessarily Byzantine health care system in this country, even for those with health insurance, I've been spending the last few weeks crawling along inside the black dog, hanging on by my fingernails not to slide any further down that cone where I sincerely fear I might get wedged and never crawl out again.

I apologize for taking up space to write so personally, but if there is one benefit beyond my own selfish expiation, it is to tell anyone who reads this that there should never be shame or fear in seeking help when you find yourself not just having a bad day or two, but weeks and months of despair and hopelessness and hatred for every time you have to speak with another person. It's not weakness, it is illness, and in most, maybe all cases it is treatable. The devil in the affliction is that it disables even the faintest light of possibility that life can ever be enjoyable again, and that is the tragedy. If I didn't know intellectually that treatment is there and can work very effectively, I'd have given up long, long ago. But even as I don't feel hopeful, I have memory of having had a time in my life when every morning was the beginning of a fascinating day and I could not believe how lucky I was to have the world before me, so beautiful, and so full of possibilities.

If you ever find yourself here, deep inside this black dog, please tell someone. Find help. Talk to your doctor.

It's no way to live, and there are no heroes who continue to dwell here.

And Now It's Come to This...

To my pals who like to check out ol' Olaf now and then and leave comments, I'm afraid I've had to institute a moderation step into the process. Due to perhaps my own intemperate (considering the effect) commenting on another blog, I experienced a mild version of internet harrassment, including having my blog name and link spoofed. Thanks to Ed Ward at Berlin Bites (check it out--excellent writing and also listen for Ed's pieces on culture and music on Fresh Air with Terry Gross), the damage was limited.

What a pain in the ass. But that's the price of freedom of the net.

Anyway, now I'll be checking posted comments to filter a particular individual's ravings. I hate censorship, but that's essentially what it amounts to.

We had a similar problem at our local city council meetings. At one time, anyone could address the council for any purpose with no time limit...until one individual started using it as a personal platform for random ravings and insults to the council members totally unrelated to policy. The consequence was that now all citizens have a three-minute time limit imposed. In the formulation of public policy (aside from asphalt contracts, maybe) most issues are complex enough to require more than three minutes to explain one's position, but thanks to the ranter, we've all had our access constrained. That limit has already been used to try to shut out dissent, and that's the truly terrible result from those who cannot or will not understand how self-control is an essential part of adult discourse.

And that's what's so damned maddening on the internet--99.999999999 percent of all users can be good stewards. Even when involved in truly rabid flame wars, all but a tiny few don't end up trying to sabotage other people's presence in the blogosphere or wherever. But a single individual with no more than an internet hookup, access to a PC, and some malevolent and pretty useless intentions can create a royal crimp in the flow of opinion.

So I'm sorry, but until I can automate filtering the way I'd like to, it's a manual process and you may not see your comments as soon as you've sent them. I'll do my best to frequently check for new comments and get them up.

Again, sorry for the hassle. Don't let it deter you saying whatever you like--I'm only filtering for one jackass.

Another Sign That the Apocalypse Is Near

When theofascist James Dobson starts making nice with Democrats, it's time to start worrying about the coming of the Rapture, so I visited our pals over at Rapture Ready Index which is hovering at 159, a full 14 points above the highest threshold labeled "Fasten Your Seatbelts." Apparently, the recent election results caused the index to jump three points, so I'd expect Jesus to be coming over the horizon any day now to kick off the End Times.

You could almost say, as Chimpie stands down, Jesus will stand up. And that's because, you know, left-wingers are the spawn of Satan. We might as well confess as such, since we're going to be boiling in the hell cauldron for a while before being sent to eternal suffering in the underworld; that is, we "shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb," those sadistic bastards.

Rejecting Bush has put us sinful Americans on the top of God's shit list, at least according to the Tim LeHayes of the world. But this raises a nagging question: Who is the Antichrist?

Name your favorite candidate on the global scene today. Perhaps it is someone as yet unknown to us generally, but to you personally? Maybe the Antichrist is your neighbor, your friend, your mother, brother, or your uncle Buddy.

Let me know.

Veterans Day

It wasn't until I went out to get the mail that I remembered that today is the proper Veterans Day, rather than the holiday day, or the furniture sale day, or the day to earn political points on the backs of young (and not so young) men and women who serve as the apolitical armed force of the United States. I went to the oak filing cabinet to see if I could find my honorable discharge certificate and my DD214. Among those papers were some photographs of a man thirty-five years younger, with jet black hair and not a wrinkle. On my expired military ID it had my weight as fifty pounds lighter than I am now--a skinny wretch back then or a fat fuck today? Hard to say, really, though I'm sure some of the commenters will weigh in with their opinions (the ones who know me, anyway). I'm probably healthier now than then. I smoked a pack a day or more then, drank like a young man can and ought to before he gets serious, and was more belligerent than a stupid stringbean ought to be.

It was not a particularly popular thing to be in the military then, but I still was proud of being there. True, I was exceedingly lucky--Russian language training, crypto school, and Berlin, rather than advanced infantry training, survival school, and Vietnam--so I had it much, much easier than many others whose military experience was the kind of adventure that involves mutilation and death rather than simply strange lands and new ways of viewing the world. Across this nation there are men and women who are similarly going through their old boxes of memories, remembering comrades, or still outrunning nightmares. Their sacrifices were surely greater than mine, and I must remind myself daily to be grateful for the grace that their selflessness has accorded me in my life.

It is a time I also remember my grandfather who served the Army in WWI, my father who served during Korea, my uncles and aunts who fought in Europe and the Pacific in WWII, and how as a child I thrilled to look at their photo albums of them when they were young, and dark-haired, and skinny, and immortal.

There are many, many things worth fighting for--I am no pacifist--and when we choose our battles wisely and reluctantly, we can honor the memory of all those who have passed before. Please remember this day that those who wear the uniform do so because it is essential, and that even in the face or irresponsible leadership, they honor us all with their dedication and sacrifice.

Happy Veterans Day.