Repeat after me, boys and girls, this mantra: PROGRESS OVER PERFECTION.

I don't give a damn whether you're so liberal you wear leaves for shoes to keep from hurting cows or so conservative you recoil at the idea of a public ANYTHING...we are SOOOOOO close, guys, to literally changing history, that we cannot, we WILL NOT...blow it at this point by bickering amongst our little Democratic selves because we're not getting every single little itty bitty solitary thing we want in a health care bill or any other bill that is before congress these days.

Furthermore, what's up with trashing our own president day and night, night and day? 

Doesn't he get anough of that crap on Faux News all the time?  Hasn't he got enough enemies?  Do you really WANT a President Palin in three years?

I mean, seriously.  I'm asking you.  Do you really, really want a President Palin, or a President Conservative Republican in a few years or even a conservative congress obstructing everything President Obama tries to do because WHHHYYYY?

Because, the Independents he so desperately needs to maintain his majority and his office have been siphoned off because whenever they turned to the Democrats or to any Democratic forum, all they saw was Obama getting ripped apart as badly as they saw him getting ripped apart by the Republicans so, therefore, they decided, he must be some kind of turd.

Time to vote Republican, eh?

Wow.  It took us less than a year to destroy everything we worked for in 2008, didn't it?

And no, before you attack, let me go into some detail on WHY I think President Obama is actually doing a helluva lot better job than many of you do, and why so much of it is under the radar of most of the media attention and most of the Talking Heads' attention on both the left and the right.

I've been stockpiling articles beside my elbow since summer on this, so I'll have Links Galore, as is my wont.  Some pretty good stuff.  I think you'll like it.  And I think that, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, unless you are a Teabagger, you will feel better at the end of this post.

It'll be loosely divided into three parts.

First:  PROGRESS OVER PERFECTION

I've only got one source on this one, but it's so good I'm going to quote extensively from him.  That would be Paul Begala, who as we all know, was a consultant to President Clinton during the last health care battle.  His piece, in the Washington Post, came out last August but is still timely and is titled, wouldn't you know?  "Progress Over Perfection."

He writes:

Progressive politics is, in my view, a movement, not a monument. We cannot achieve perfection in this life, and if that is our goal we will always be frustrated. The right has far more modest goals: At every turn, its members seek to advance their power and protect privilege. I've never seen the Republican right oppose a tax cut for the rich because it wasn't generous enough; I've never seen them oppose a set of loopholes for corporate lobbyists because one industry or another wasn't included. The left, on the other hand, too often prefers a glorious defeat to an incremental victory.

Our history teaches us otherwise. No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt's original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers -- a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn't even cover the clergy. FDR's Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn't work, you got nothing from Social Security.

He goes on to say that, for example, if the public option does not make it into today's version of the bill, that does not necessarily mean that it never will.  But to completely derail the entire health care reform bill, to table it flat-out, simply because one aspect of it is not included, would be a tragedy that could take decades for us to recover from, as he so painfully points out:

I carry a heavy burden of regret from my role in setting the bar too high the last time we tried fundamental health reform. I was one of the people who advised President Bill Clinton to wave his pen at Congress in 1994 and declare: "If you send me legislation that does not guarantee every American private health insurance that can never be taken away, you will force me to take this pen, veto the legislation, and we'll come right back here and start all over again." I helped set the bar at 100 percent -- "guarantee every American" -- and after our failure it's taken us 15 years to start all over again.

So I am trying to find the right blend of principle and pragmatism -- ever mindful that, aside from race, health care is the most difficult domestic issue of the past century. FDR couldn't pass it. Nor could Truman, nor Nixon nor Carter nor Clinton. Lesser presidents like George W. Bush didn't even try.

The Founders gave us a standard: "a more perfect Union." It's an odd phrase; we don't generally speak of something becoming "more perfect." I believe it means that we have a duty, every generation, to make progress. For a dozen generations we have done that, in our imperfect way. Let's hope those writing the new health-reform bill can give us something that represents historic progress -- and that those of us most passionately committed to fundamental reform can celebrate progress, not lament a lack of perfection.

I don't think that anyone could question the liberal credentials of Paul Begala.  I believe he was sincere when he wrote this piece and I have also heard long-time congresspeople echo his comments that other pieces of landmark legislation, such as civil rights legislation, came in increments.

CHANGE comes in increments.

That hairy, ugly caterpiller doesn't do a pretty little whirlagig and unfurl his gorgeous wings all at once.  He builds an ugly cocoon and holes up.  If you've ever seen a cocoon busted open before its time, it's pretty ugly.

Legislation moving its way through congress is about as pretty, which brings me to the second part:

"WHY CAN'T OBAMA BE MORE LIKE LBJ?"

I hear this all the time.  Liberals criticizing Obama because, presumably, he's not twisting arms, kicking Democratic ass and taking Democratic names like Lyndon Johnson presumably did when he got the Voting Rights Act and Medicare passed in the 60's.

I always wonder, first of all...what makes you so damn sure he's NOT?

More on that, later.

First, a quick bit of history.  Keep in mind that when LBJ first came into office--and I'm not even counting that terrible day in Dallas 46 years ago; I'm just talking about after he got elected in a landslide in 1964.  Understand that he had a great deal of sympathy behind him because a lot of what he was championing had been talked about by Kennedy, but also understand that Johnson had been a congressman and then a senator (serving as minority leader and majority leader) for many years, (decades, actually), so he had many friends in both houses AND a powerful fellow Texan as the Speaker of the House in Sam Rayburn. 

All these things gave him advantages that Obama does not have.

Also, back then, there were moderate Republicans who could be cajoled and threatened and horse-traded for votes.  It was a different era, a different time.  Even a different media--remember, back then, most of the press knew about JFK's lady friends and affairs but did not write about them.  It was an old boys' club in many ways, both for the media and the government.

That said.

Let's examine what President Obama HAS been doing, and it's waaaay more than you may think.

First of all, I hear liberals, especially in places like Huffington Post, or on shows like Ed Schultz, howl that Obama has "sold out" to Big Pharma or the AMA or some other lobbyist to get health care concessions, as if making those agreements is going to leave children shivering naked in corporate doorways somewhere.

But those criticisms are completely missing the point, as was BINGOED by no less a liberal source than Mother Jones, and no less a liberal writer than Kevin Drum, in his piece, "The Long, Hard Slog Revisited"

In it, he points out that, again, in order to win over Independents, you have to go about it in an entirely different way than you would if you were reaching out to your own partisans during, say, a political campaign:

(quoting Jonathan Bernstein)

Loose partisans and true independents aren't ideologues and are unlikely to become ideologues. What you probably can do -- what Reagan probably did -- is to teach them....But you don't do that by reasoning with them, or with inspiring them with great speeches. You mostly do that, as crude as it sounds, by winning. You do it by creating winning coalitions that put Establishment People on your side.

....The convincing doesn't happen, either in the short term or the long term, from presidential eloquence. The convincing comes when, for example, you've been a Republican main street AMA member all your professional life, and you suddenly find that the AMA is supporting health care reform while the Republicans are attacking the AMA. Even then, you may still be resistant to Obama...until you start hearing him saying the things that you're reading in the AMA newsletter (or however the AMA communicates with doctors. I don't know).

Now, there's no question that Obama and the Democrats in Congress are doing this.  They've basically coopted the insurance companies, the AMA, big pharma, AARP, and corporate interests by giving away goodies to all of them.  This isn't exactly the Schoolhouse Rock version of how a bill becomes law, but it's certainly the real-world way.  And it works pretty well as long as you can get the coalitions to stick together and keep the bribery from stinking up the joint too badly.

But does this actually move public opinion at the same time?  Maybe! 

...There's no question, though, that winning is indeed a powerful aphrodisiac.  Healthcare reform might be controversial right now, but if Obama gets a bill onto his desk and signs it, it will become a huge triumph almost overnight.  Support for both the bill and for Obama will rise steadily, and Democrats of all kinds will reap the benefit of being seen as tough enough and savvy enough to get it passed.  This is the fundamental reason that I'm optimistic about healthcare reform.  Every Democrat in Congress knows that if reform fails, they'll be viewed as losers and they'll pay the price at the polls in November.  They have to pass something if they want to remain in power.  That's a prospect that concentrates the mind powerfully.

I hate to put it in simplistic terms like "winning" and "losing" but America seems to be on this reality TV streak these days, and they see a lot of things as winners and losers.  And they know more about what's going on in Washington than the wingnuts would have you believe.  If health care dies, the majority of Americans will know that the Republicans killed it, but they will also know that the Democrats let it die.

That the Democrats lost.

And they won't trust us with anything again.

We've got to keep the momentum going, and get health care passed.  We can work out some of our more passionate details later, as we had to do with Medicare, Social Security, civil rights, and other landmark legislation.  Would have been a damn pity not to have passed those at all just because they weren't perfect in their original form.

Win.  Lose.  It's a CHOICE.

And it's more up to us than you might think, but more on that later.

Another criticism I've seen is that Obama has not been specific enough on the bill, that he's left entirely too much up to congress, that he has not "owned" it, that he's stayed too much in the background.

But a longtime denizen of Capitol Hill sees it in far more realistic terms.  Writing for the Washington Post, Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute posited back in September that he was seeing from the administration "signs of savvy, not weakness."

Ornstein put his finger on the the fickle mood of the public when he pointed out that:

Without some guarantee that reform thus defined will be enacted for the vast majority of Americans, the likelihood has always been that the closer government gets to enacting change, the more nervous voters would get about embracing the devil they don't know. And the closer one gets to broad change affecting 16 percent of the economy and a hefty slice of the workforce, the more those whose incomes depend on the current system will fight to keep their share.

He then went into the obvious--that there IS no broad bi-partisan leadership support OR broad bi-partisan majority in either house, in any political universe, and reminded readers that this is similar to what faced Clinton in 1994; only today, the filibuster lines drawn in the sand make every issue a 60-vote battle.

How to prevail under these difficult circumstances? The only realistic way was to avoid a bill of particulars, to stay flexible, and to rely on congressional party and committee leaders in both houses to find the sweet spots to get bills through individual House and Senate obstacle courses. Under these circumstances, the best intervention from the White House is to help break impasses when they arise and, toward the end, the presidential bully pulpit and the president's political capital can help to seal the deal.

He goes on to make his final case--as did Paul Begala--that

The odds remain reasonable that a solid, if not dramatic, health reform bill can make it through this process and become law. Any bill, under these conditions, will be a major accomplishment. The odds have been improved, not damaged, by the president's approach.

Again, though, there are those who want to know why President Obama is not more the arm-twister like LBJ, and AGAIN, I ask...How do you know he is NOT?

Several articles I've come across indicate that the president is doing far, far more behind the scenes than most of us realize.

An in-depth profile of Obama's team, called "Taking the Hill," by Matt Bai, published in the New York Times magazine back in June of 2009, set up how Obama structured his White House to organize for various legislative battles.  I'll go into that first, and then, a short piece in the Times from back in September, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Taking Health Care Courtship Up Another Notch," more or less demonstrated that team in motion as it worked the phones, the restaurants, the meetings, even the gyms, during the committee process to garner votes to get the bill out of the Baucus Finance committee. 

Both are highly instructive as to how the Obama White House is far more active, alive, and energetic in the legislative process--quietly and behind the scenes--than most people realize. 

It is, in fact, a brilliant strategy, because it enables the towering egos of the House and Senate to get their moments before the cameras, their home-town papers, and their constituents, while quietly building one of the biggest legislative achievements of the past century for their president.

If, as he hopes, they are able to get this health care reform legislation passed, in its entirety, in time for his State of the Union speech in January of 2010, it will be a triumph not just for him, but for the American people.

In Matt Bai's Times Magazine piece, he points out that Obama's White House "methodically assembled the most Congress-centric administration in modern history."

Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn't only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it's also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

And it's not just his choice of Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff, who everybody by now knows was a congressman who was largely credited with helping to build the current congressional Democratic majority and who was on the fast-track to make Speaker of the House--that was key to this strategy, but also his choice of Joe Biden for vice-president.

"I'm a Senate guy," Biden told me bluntly when I visited him a few weeks ago in his West Wing office. "It's been my whole life, and I'm incredibly proud of it. Other presidents I've worked with, they view Congress almost as a constitutional impediment, you know?"

Not only have former congressional aides been hired at the White House and used extensively for their access, but from the beginning, Obama and his team have searched for creative ways to include congressmen and women, and their families, at White House events, both formal and informal, (as of mid-May, when the article was being prepared, more than 300 congresspersons and 80 senators had visited the White House), and it has paid off.

When Matt Bai asked Sen. Baucus his impression of President Obama, he gave this thoughtful response:

"How do I say this delicately?" he asked. "President Bush, he liked being president. You know, there are be-ers, and there are doers. And I think he liked being president, as opposed to doing." Obama, on the other hand, strikes Baucus as a doer. "You've really got to work at it, rather than just enjoying the job," he said.

Rahm Emmanuel has been known to give out his cellphone number to every Democratic senator (and some Republicans too), and, like Biden, often works out at the congressional gym.

And it's not just that senators meet with the president that is important.  It's HOW they meet with him:

Obama is not the schmoozer that Clinton was, nor does he bestow nicknames like Bush. Rather, he has impressed lawmakers with a direct, businesslike manner and an outward deference to the legislative branch. As Obama mulled whether to nominate Sonia Sotomayor or some other jurist to the Supreme Court last month, he called every member of the Judiciary Committee personally, taking the "advise" part of "advise and consent" to a level that impressed some longtime senators. "This is the first time I've ever been called by a president on a Supreme Court nomination, be it a Republican or a Democrat," Charles Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa, told Peter Baker and Adam Nagourney of The Times after Sotomayor's nomination was announced. A hallmark of Obama's style, in these early months, has been to meet with key senators alone, without the phalanx of aides who almost always attend Oval Office meetings. Three senators with whom I spoke, including Baucus, had been impressed by this tactic; it implies equality between the branches of government and enables Obama to establish personal relationships more quickly than he otherwise might. ("You been hunting lately?" Obama asked Ben Nelson when the Nebraska senator walked into the Oval Office and found himself, much to his surprise, alone with the president.)[emphasis mine] 

All these meetings have actually angered some on the left, who claim that it does no good to try and compromise on things like the public option or the Stupak amendment, because it will only water down the bill to basically nothing; that we should simply ram it through on reconciliation with 51 votes exactly as we please. 

Simply do as Bush did with his tax cuts and get on with it.

But Sen. Baucus cautions, and President Obama has also mentioned on the stump, that the dangers of reconciliation are that a future Republican administration could far more easily dismantle the program. What the president and the Democratic congress want to do is put into place a reform package that will stay in place for the ages, even if it has to be done in increments.

(There are other, procedural problems with reconciliation that I'm not going to go into here because I've already taken up too much space for most of you to keep reading, as it is.)

In Stolberg's piece in the Times, which was published on September 27 (link up above), during the committe process when Susan Collins' vote was being heavily wooed by the White House, there are a number of people besides JUST Rahm Emmanuel who the White House sent to talk to Sen. Collins, including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, Gary Locke, the commerce secretary, White House budget director Peter Orszag, and on and on.

It was courtship by committee.

Call it what you will, it worked.

So...what were you saying about LBJ?

And last part, HOW CAN WE BE THE CHANGE WE WANT TO SEE?

In Anna Quindland's powerful cover story for Newsweek, "Hope Springs Eternal" (which appeared on the cover as "Yes He Can: A Liberal's Survival Guide"), she goes straight for the jugular when she makes the visceral point that there is, indeed, a big difference between campaigning and GOVERNING.

From time to time the American people participate in a mass delusion about how their government works. Such a delusion took place exactly a year ago, when a 47-year-old African-American who had once been accorded little chance of prevailing was elected president of the United States.

History will judge Barack Obama over the long haul. But we've learned something in the short term that is simple, obvious, and has less to do with him than with the Founding Fathers. This is a country that often has transformational ambitions but is saddled with an incremental system, a nation built on revolution, then engineered so the revolutionary can rarely take hold.

Checks and balances: that's how we learn about it in social-studies class, and in theory it is meant to guard against a despotic executive, a wild-eyed legislature, an overweening judiciary. And it's also meant to safeguard the rights of the individual; as James Madison, president and father of the Constitution, once said, "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." But what our system has meant during the poisonous partisan civil war that has paralyzed Washington in recent years is that very little of the big stuff gets done. It simply can't.

She goes on to detail promises that President Obama made during the campaign that impatient progressives fault him for not having fulfilled yet in his mere nine months in office, as if all he had to do were to wave his magic wand and POOF! it would take place.  (And although, yes, there are some things that he can cause to happen in just that way through executive order, he must also weigh the relative wisdom of such a course of action versus going about it in another, albeit slower method--again, that would be less likely to be dismantled later.  It doesn't mean it will never happen.  It just might take a bit longer.)

The president is a person of nuance. But on both ends of the political number line, nuance is seen as wishy-washy. There's no nuance in partisan attacks, soundbites, slogans, which is why Barack Obama didn't run with the lines "Some change you might like if you're willing to settle" or "Yes, we can, but it will take a while."

That's really how our government works, by inches...

Americans point to events ranging from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Voting Rights Act to show that America knows how to think--and act--big. But a stroll through actual history, as opposed to the cherry-tree-chopping sort, provides a different narrative. Many abolitionists decried Lincoln's executive order, which freed few slaves and failed to make the buying and selling of humans illegal, while conservatives thought it was radical and unwise. In other words, it was a smallish, moderate, middle-ground measure. And while it has become gospel that Franklin Roosevelt utterly transformed the public weal through the New Deal, he was so frustrated by the opposition of conservative members of his own party that he proposed to Wendell Willkie that the liberal Democrats and the liberal Republicans join together to create a liberal party.

She then goes on to quote Doris Kearns Goodwin, a historian who actually worked for LBJ, who stated that LBJ was able to accomplish what he did, in part, by promising Congress that they would be making history, and that, "This Congress has never known the joy of that accomplishment.  They haven't ever been part of an institution that moves collectively to change history for the benefit of the American people."

Which brings me to my final point:

 She also notes that the presidents who have made real change have always done so in the same way: "Each of them had the country pushing the Congress to act, the people and the press both. The pressure has to come from outside." So if the American people want the president to be more like the Barack Obama they elected, maybe they should start acting more like the voters who elected him, who forcibly and undeniably moved the political establishment to where it didn't want to go. After all, in our system, even great, audacious change is never as audacious as it seems: calls for a national health-care system can be traced all the way back to Roosevelt--Teddy Roosevelt, in 1912. When Sen. Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, broke with her party to vote a health-care bill out of committee, she said, "When history calls, history calls."

Now, this is the thing, my friends.

We've been making a fine noise on this health care reform business, but mostly, we've been making it amongst ourselves, bickering and arguing back and forth with each other, blasting our own president for not doing this or doing too much of that, threatening to boycott this or not vote for that--and that goes for our own members in the House and Senate!

What the hell is WRONG with us?

WE CAN'T DO THIS NOW!

Not NOW.

We are too close.

WE ARE IN THE MAJORITY AND WE HAVE TO FIGHT FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM EVEN IF IT DOESN'T CONTAIN EVERY SINGLE LITTLE THING WE WANT.

My daughter is 29 years old.  She works so hard she can barely walk sometimes but she does not have health care right now.  I want her to be able to have health care.  I would love for her to be able to choose from a public option, but that may not be possible.  I would hope that, at least, with millions more consumers, with checks and balances and regulations provided, that she would be able to find an affordable plan through health care reform.

She won't even have THAT option if we don't stop fighting amongst ourselves, Democrats.

Some of us don't even care, as Charles M. Blow points out in his op-ed, "Health Care Hullabaloo."  He wrote it last August, but he said that even though 8 in 10 Democrats favored health care reform, it was the right-wingnutters who were dominating the airwaves because THEY were the ones who were jumping up and getting active about it.

Now, I know many many Democrats who called congresspeople, some who went door to door or called neighbors or donated to Organizing for America or blogged or did whatever they could, but I knew about ten times as many who barely paid any attention at all, and in the time being?

The nutcases started winning over the Independents.  May not seem like that big a deal right now, but it will in a few years, trust me.

But I'll give the final word to Bob Herbert of the New York Times, "Changing the World."

It's so easy to criticize Obama because, hey, he promised CHANGE and he hasn't done it yet, eh?

But he can't do it without us.  WE are the change.  He needs us to have his back, not for us to stand around throwing rotten tomatoes at him because he's not working fast enought to suit us, or because what he's doing is not perfect enough or because he won't show us what is going on inside the cocoon, right?

Herbert writes:

One of the most cherished items in my possession is a postcard that was sent from Mississippi to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June 1964.

"Dear Mom and Dad," it says, "I have arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy."

That was the last word sent to his family by Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old college student who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, on his first full day in Mississippi -- June 21, the same date as the postmark on the card. The goal of the three young men had been to help register blacks to vote.

The postcard was given to me by Andrew's brother, David, who has become a good friend.

Andrew and that postcard came to mind over the weekend as I was thinking about the sense of helplessness so many ordinary Americans have been feeling as the nation is confronted with one enormous, seemingly intractable problem after another. The helplessness is beginning to border on paralysis.

He goes on to point out some of the more obvious problems facing our nation: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unemployment and foreclosures and homelessness, the H1N1 flu virus, suicide bombings, and so on, and then

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.

This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class.

This passivity and sense of helplessness most likely stems from the refusal of so many Americans over the past few decades to acknowledge any sense of personal responsibility for the policies and choices that have led the country into such a dismal state of affairs, and to turn their backs on any real obligation to help others who were struggling.

Those chickens have come home to roost. Being an American has become a spectator sport. Most Americans watch the news the way you'd watch a ballgame, or a long-running television series, believing that they have no more control over important real-life events than a viewer would have over a coach's strategy or a script for "Law & Order."

With that kind of attitude, Andrew Goodman would never have left the comfort of his family home in Manhattan. Rosa Parks would have gotten up and given her seat to a white person, and the Montgomery bus boycott would never have happened. Betty Friedan would never have written "The Feminine Mystique."

The nation's political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. 

See, that's what I'm thinkin', guys.  I'm thinkin' that much of the past eight years, especially amongst the Democratic side, left us with this residual feeling of trapped helplessness that we only halfway got out of with the campaign.  I say, "halfway," because so many of us imbued President Obama with some kind of Superman powers, where we sort of expected him to leap tall buildings with a single bound, so to speak.  

We relaxed.  We thought, Go for it, man. Go fix the world.

But it doesn't work like that.  He needs our help.  He can't do this alone, gang, and he for SURE can't do it with us griping and whining and arguing and bickering and finding fault with every little thing the man does, criticizing him so much on our side that people in the middle, who can't decide what to think, look to us, then look over to the right, and then think, I guess this Barack Obama guy doesn't know WHAT he's doing.

What the hell.  Sarah Palin's kinda cute...

Right now, we're soooo damn close.  Let's close ranks, get behind our president, fight for what's right, get this thing passed.

Bob Herbert writes:

We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference.

It can start with just a few small steps. Mrs. Parks helped transform a nation by refusing to budge from her seat. Maybe you want to speak up publicly about an important issue, or host a house party, or perhaps arrange a meeting of soon-to-be dismissed employees, or parents at a troubled school.

It's a risk, sure. But the need is great, and that's how you change the world.

It doesn't take a whole lot.

You can donate a few bucks to Organize for America, for TV commercials.  If you can't do that, you can call your senators, let them know how important health care reform is to you.  You can talk about it to your neighbors, you can fact-check viral e-mails that cross your desk and let family and friends know the truth about health care reform.

You can stand up for the president you elected and show the world you're still proud of that vote.

You can do what you can.

You can still change the world.  It's just gonna take some time, is all.  

In her thoughtful and literary op-ed for the New York Times, "Back from War, but Not Really Home," Caroline Alexander quotes an epic poem thousands of years old that perfectly captures how it feels, even today, for the man or woman, home from war:

WASHED onto the shores of his island home, after 10 years' absence in a foreign war and 10 years of hard travel in foreign lands, Odysseus, literature's most famous veteran, stares around him: "But now brilliant Odysseus awoke from sleep in his own fatherland, and he did not know it,/having been long away." Additionally, the goddess Athena has cast an obscuring mist over all the familiar landmarks, making "everything look otherwise/than it was." "Ah me," groans Odysseus, "what are the people whose land I have come to this time?"

But if epic poetry is not your thing, then perhaps the words of the unsinkable Max Cleland, who lost half his body to a grenade in Vietnam, can sum it up better, in his op-ed, "The Forever War of the Mind":

"EVERY day I was in Vietnam, I thought about home. And, every day I've been home, I've thought about Vietnam." So said one of the millions of soldiers who fought there as I did. Change the name of the battlefield and it could have been said by one of the American servicemen coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan today. Wars are not over when the shooting stops. They live on in the lives of those who fight them. That is the curse of the soldier. He never forgets.

It is the sad lot of the war veteran, male or female, soldier, Marine, airman or sailor, no matter what the war, that people back home (other than friends and family) seldom give them a thought unless something horrific happens like the Fort Hood shooting of the other day.  Or a patriotic holiday.  Or maybe, a movie like Rambo.

Usually, though, returning vets are slotting into the "crazy" section of people's minds when something like this happens and the media lights up like a Christmas tree with all the stories about post traumatic stress syndrome.  And then the movies and TV shows get made of returning vets flipping out and taking hostages or shooting up a bank or turning serial killer.

This used to particularly bother my husband during the Rambo craze.  It seemed to him that in just about every action-adventure movie we went to see, the crazy criminal was a Vietnam vet gone nuts.  Now we're starting to see it updated, with Iraq or Afghanistan vets portrayed as the crazy war vet.

Now, do not misunderstand.  I do not for one moment make light of the serious problems faced by our men and women who have served in these endless wars, and statistics are bearing out that it as the multiple deployments that are increasing the rates of PTSD exponentially.  For each deployment, the chances go up.

So, the stats that say that 35% of troops who have served in these wars will at one time or another be diagnosed with PTSD are very true, and that is only those who have been diagnosed; there are many more who either have not received a formal diagnosis or who have not sought out serious help for their symptoms.

And it is true that signs of stress on our armed forces are straining the military beyond belief: rising suicide rates, family violence, divorce--even things that have only recently been measured, such as post-deployment motorcycle accidents that have resulted in fatalities, and things like barroom fights.  These are all serious signs of severe stress resulting from these constant and ongoing deployments.

Because what most civilians do not understand is that, even when they are not deployed, they are TRAINING for the next deployment, which means that they are still away from their families for long periods of time and they are still in simulated war games which can exacerbate combat stress, as well as family stress when they return from training exercises.

I am very aware of all of this.  So don't get me wrong.

But what I am trying to say is that so many of these men and women--thousands upon thousands of them--are managing.  Quite well, in fact.

They complete their tours of duty; they get out of the service; they return to school and/or find jobs; they marry, start families.  They join their communities.  They thrive.

The war is always with them, okay?  It just is.  That is their reality, and it is always going to be their reality.

Sometimes they have sleepless nights.  Nightmares.  Headaches.  Irritability.  Short tempers.  They struggle with that sometimes.  Maybe they apologize to their spouses a bit more often than you or me.

If they are fortunate, they'll have a spouse who understands and will be patient with them while they work through it.  If not, well, sometimes the marriage itself doesn't work out, but then, often, the next one will.

Maybe they spend a bit more time off to themselves than we do.  Maybe, in a group of people, they are kind of quiet.  Maybe they don't often talk about what is on their minds, and maybe there is a good reason for that.

Writes Alexander:

But it is "The Odyssey" that most directly probes the theme of the war veteran's return. Threaded through this fairytale saga, amid its historic touchstones, are remarkable scenes addressing aspects of the war veteran's experience that are disconcertingly familiar to our own age. Odysseus returns home to a place he does not recognize, and then finds his homestead overrun with young men who have no experience of war. Throughout his long voyage back, he has reacted to each stranger with elaborate caginess, concocting stories about who he is and what he has seen and done -- the real war he keeps to himself.

...

Similarly, while Odysseus is lost at sea, his son, Telemachus, embarks on a voyage of discovery, also seeking out his father's former comrades, but those who lived to return. First of these is old Nestor, a veteran of many campaigns, now at home in sandy Pylos. No mortal man could "tell the whole of it," says Nestor of the years at Troy, where "all who were our best were killed." In Sparta, Menelaus, whose wife, Helen, was the cause of the war, is haunted by the losses: "I wish I lived in my house with only a third part of all/these goods, and that the men were alive who died in those days/in wide Troy land."

Men and women who have fought in a bloody war do not usually go around brooding on those things day and night but little things can remind them or set them off, as can anniversary dates, and they usually try to keep their moods to themselves to avoid upsetting those close to them.

My son, for example, will go for a long run rather than take it out on his girlfriend.

Sometimes it is just the heedlessness of those around them that is distressing. 

I'll never forget when I visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.  I began to sob as soon as I saw the names at the bottom level, and the further I walked toward the center of the monument the harder I wept until I stood, utterly and completely surrounded--not by names--but by what I saw as the faces of boys I'd known, boys I'd kissed good-night on my doorstep and sent Care packages to and mailed letters to, and I couldn't stop crying...while all around me, insensitive tourists too young to have known that war laughed, jostled, and posed for snapshots in front of the Wall.

These are the things that upset veterans.

Writes Max Cleland:

War is haunting. Death. Pain. Blood. Dismemberment. A buddy dying in your arms. Imagine trying to get over the memory of a bomb splitting a Humvee apart beneath your feet and taking your leg with it. The first time I saw the stilled bodies of American soldiers dead on the battlefield is as stark and brutal a memory as the one of the grenade that ripped off my right arm and both legs.

No, the soldier never forgets. But neither should the rest of us.

Veterans returning today represent the first real influx of combat-wounded soldiers in a generation. They are returning to a nation unprepared for what war does to the soul. Those new veterans will need all of our help. After America's wars, the used-up fighters are too often left to fend for themselves.

One thing Caroline Alexander points out is that, even in the ancient times, nations seem more comfortable honoring the war DEAD than they do the war SURVIVOR: 

In "The Iliad," Achilles must choose between kleos or nostos -- glory or a safe return home. By dying at Troy, Achilles was assured of undying fame as the greatest of all heroes. His choice reflects an uneasy awareness that it is far easier to honor the dead soldier than the soldier who returns.

You would think, as Alexander points out, that one way to honor the modern war veterans would be heroic war movies, which have been made since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began.

And yet box office receipts tell a different story.  No one seems to want to pay money to watch them. 

What does THAT tell returning war vets?  We still read about Troy but YOUR stories don't matter?

There has been a strange disconnect from the beginning between these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American public back home.  President Bush, who started both wars, asked nothing in return from the American people--no war-tax to help pay for them, no sacrifice of any kind.  He deliberately hid the war-dead from them, and when the public began to turn against the war, the Pentagon instituted a strict policy preventing war photographers from depicting photographs of wounded soldiers or Marines without the express written consent of those troops who, of course, were in no position to provide it, which sanitized the war even further.

And of course, there was no draft, so the same 1% of the population just kept fighting the same wars over and over again while everybody else went shopping.

At some point the war began to seem more like a video game or a movie or even a patriotic country-music song to be forwarded in e-mails to friends and family; somehow it just didn't seem real.

As Cleland points out in his piece, when it comes to funding wars, Congress has no problem coming up with billions and billions for all the Humvees and Predator drones and tanks and guns they need.

But when the soldiers and Marines who have been fighting those wars come home broken and wounded, suddenly, the dollars dry up.

We'd been at war for FIVE YEARS before the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed came to light.  Five years.

Cleland writes:

Weeks before the troubles at Walter Reed became public in 2007, my counselor put it to me simply. "We are drowning in war," she said. The problems at Walter Reed had nothing to do with the dedicated doctors and nurses there. The problems had to do with the White House and Congress and the Department of Defense. The problems had to do with money.

When we are at war, America spends billions on missiles, tanks, attack helicopters and such. But the wounded warriors who will never fight again tend to be put on the back burner.

This is inexcusable, and it comes with frightening moral costs.

He goes on to detail the obvious, and then he points out something not so obvious:

We have a family Army today, unlike the Army seen in any generation before. We have fought these wars with the Reserves and the National Guard. Fathers, mothers, soccer coaches and teachers are the soldiers coming home. Whether they like it or not, they will bring their war experiences home to their families and communities.

In his poem "The Dead Young Soldiers," Archibald MacLeish, whose younger brother died in World War I, has the soldiers in the poem tell us:"We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning." Until we help our returning soldiers get their lives back when they come home, the promise of restoring that meaning will go unfulfilled. 

So...you're sitting here reading this (still, I hope), and you're thinking, well, geez, what can I do?  I mean, I care and all, but I dunno...

Maybe you meet a vet or a soldier at an airport and you shake his or her hand and say, "Thank you for your service."

That's nice.  They appreciate that.

But here are some other ideas.

Once, when my son was on his last "free" night before deploying to Iraq with the Marines, he went out for a meal of sushi at his favorite place in San Diego.  Now, admittedly, that's obviously a military town, Camp Pendleton is right there, and although he was in civilian clothes he had that military bearing that is unmistakeable, and the haircut...

He got up to pay his bill, and the guy said, "Sir, your bill has been taken care of, by the couple at the end of the bar."

Dustin was so surprised, and he went to thank them, and they said simply, "Son, thank you for your service."

Now, I doubt many of you will have similar opportunities, but maybe you know a couple who might be struggling, and one of them recently served.  Do you think they could use a night on the town but are having trouble affording a babysitter?  How about you volunteer a night for free?

Or, say you get a coupon for a free meal at Olive Garden or whatever, you give it to a vet and say, Hey, I hate Olive Garden?  (Maybe you don't really, but you get my drift.)

If you're in a position to offer them a job, by all means do so--you won't regret it.  Or if you know how, help them beef up their resume and transfer their military skills to the civilian world.

Be creative.  There are a million ways you can quietly show your support for a man or a woman who are doing their best to adjust to civilian life after they have served.  You can let them know that you appreciate them just by being their friend.

That's it, really.

Just be their friend.  It doesn't matter whether you supported the war or you opposed the war.  It doesn't matter who you voted for.  This is a man or woman who stepped up, did their duty, and now, they're doing their best to adjust and fit in to a place where, let's face it, they are always going to feel different.

They just are.

Just by welcoming them, letting them know you appreciate their service and that you're there to help them move on, that can make all the difference in the world as to how well they are able to make that difficult adjustment.

In this way, you can help them give meaning to their service.  Because what you may not realize is that, each day that they are alive, they are living for their buddies who did not make it, and they want to make that life worth something, they want to make that life the best they can possibly make it.

They want to live a life their buddy would have been proud to live, if they'd only had the chance.

You can help them with that, quietly, without much fuss.

It's not Odysseus, but hey, it's a start. 

There are all kinds of blackmail in this world, and they don't necessarily all involve a demand for money.

But before I get to my point, permit me to tell a funny little family story, if I may.

My husband's sister, who I'll call Mary, is an extraordinary woman who, while pretty much straight down the line conservative in her political views, could not be a sweeter, harder working, more beloved individual, and one of the things she does is volunteer at the airport USO, sending planeloads of troops off to war.  The mother of a former Marine who did three combat deployments to Iraq and the aunt of my son, also a former Marine who did two combat deployments to Iraq, and two other nephews, both army, who did tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively--to her, every one of those kids are HER kids.

She passes out Care packages to them with phone cards and goodies for the long flights, and smiles and laughs and comforts them and urges them to call home as soon as they get the opportunity, to let their families know they have arrived safely.

Our whole dang family is military.  My husband, Kent, was a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, and he and Mary's older brother did two pretty hairy tours in 'Nam with Special Forces before getting shot up pretty bad (he's okay now).  Their other brother retired a few years ago from Special Forces at the rank of Brigadier General.  Both of his sons are active duty now.

So, needless to say, at family gatherings, all us Mills wimmenfolk feel pretty safe ha ha.

So anyway Mary was doing her thing at the airport one Sunday, and a general happened to be mustering out with his unit, which is somewhat unusual, and none of the volunteers knew what to do with the guy because they were all so intimidated by him, bedazzled, dontcha know, by all those stars. 

Even in their cammies, those generals are impressive dudes.

She asked the other volunteers if anybody had thought to offer the general a Care package and they stared at her, dumbstruck.  "Why NO," they practically shouted.  The very idea sounded positively stupid to them, him being a demi-god and all.

But Mary just snorted and said, "Shoot, he's just somebody's dumb ole big brother, is all."

She grabbed up a box, approached the man, and asked him if he'd like a package and if there was anything she could do for him.  He turned out to be profoundly grateful, and said, "Ma'am, the only thing is, I hate having to hang around here right by my guys, because I don't want them to think I'm checking up on them or anything.  They've got enough on their minds as it is and I don't want to make 'em nervous.  If I could wait someplace private, that would help."

So she found an unoccupied office for him, which he appreciated, and that was that.

I'm not sure what it is about generals that engenders such media and congressional worship. 

Now, don't get me wrong--I have respect for them, too.  My brother-in-law, indeed, my whole family of military men--are pretty damn cool.  My brother-in-law has, himself, been in some pretty hairy situations while in the SF, including negotiating with warlords in the Balkans during the Bosnian conflict, and he did it again with Afghan warlords. 

My son, my husband, his brothers and our nephews--they're tough men, most of them tested in the crucible of battle, honed by fire and loss, defined by courage, and I take nothing away from that, so don't get me wrong, and don't assume I'm being disrespectful to the uniform in any way.

But in order to work your way up to the point where you're pinning stars up on your shoulders, you've left the realm of the battlefield and entered the realm of politics.  You have to be a poltical creature to get those promotions at that level.  Let's face it: there are butts you have to kiss along the way, and games you have to play.  It's the nature of the beast.  By the time you've pinned on more than one star, then more than two or three, you are a consummate player.

I think, too, we must keep in mind that many of the pundits, pontificators, and point-makers have, themselves, NEVER SERVED.  Or, if they did, many of them never saw combat, and that is a crucial point.

Ditto many in Congress who are the biggest armchair warriors out there.  Time and time again, you study the backgrounds of the loudest warmongers and noisiest hawks, you will see draft deferments or otherwise, avoidance of service, or you will see someone who served in a quiet capacity for a couple of years at a desk or something.  (Or a pilot.  You see pilots.) 

It is really rare to see someone like, say, Sen. James Webb or Sen. Chuck Hagel--a real mud-and-guts combat vet--who is a vigorous drum-beater for war.  They have seen the cost, up close and personal, and have no taste for it.

So when a four-star general with his military bearing and his ascetic, monklike habits, and his lean-mean-fighting-machine physicality comes along and he says, "I need this," then the armchair warriors are just so IN AWE of him that they can't scramble fast enough to get the man what he wants.

It never occurs to them that he may be gaming the system.

Think about it.

The Pentagon "leaks" a confidential report that states that if Obama does not give the general a set number of troops WE WILL LOSE THE WAR!!!  And he needs them RIGHT NOW!!!

Oh my God!!!

(We've been at war there the better part of a decade but NEVER MIND!!!)

Right-wingers, ever on the look-out for any opportunity to show up our pussy president for the 98-pound weakling they believe him to be, leap at the red meat like a bunch of chained-up junkyard dogs and start howling GIVE HIM WHAT HE WANTS OR YOU WILL LOSE THE WAR AND THEN WE WILL MAKE SURE YOU LOSE THE WHITE HOUSE!!!

Liberals, ever sensitive to any chance that a war might be fought somewhere in the world, leap to their feet and start screaming, PULL OUT PULL OUT PULL OUT OR WE MIGHT NOT VOTE FOR YOU AGAIN!!!

And the pundits and pontificators and point-makers start running around fawning over the shiny stars on the general's broad shoulders, all about how he only eats ONE MEAL A DAY and how he works out and how he does this and says that, and meanwhile, the general takes the media reps on a full-court press, taking them up in glossy helicopter tours over parts of the country that look good, and his loyal aides are all running around fawning over how wonderful he is, and the senior officers who must report directly to him take the reporters around to parts of the country that look good and talk about how they need 40,000 more troops and then whisk them away before they can talk to any of the actual TROOPS...

And the reporters run home and write all that down and go on the talk shows and parrot all of it...

And then the good general goes to London, and he goes to NATO and he gives talks about how he needs these troops, and then President, er, Senator McCain goes on all the talk shows and tells everybody how we're going to LOSE THE WAR IF WE DON'T GET THOSE TROOPS...

Hmmm.

Now, if the media and the politicians are not aware that they are being manipulated by a Master Politician then they are waaay stupider than I thought.

Fortunately for all of us, we've got a grown-up in the White House who knows political blackmail when he sees it and is oblivious to those tactics.

He really does not care for it.

And unlike his predecessor, he does not develop man-crushes on generals.

Now.

Let's get serious here.  Let's see what the president is looking at, why he is taking so long to look at it, and what he is most likely to do, and why the general's blackmailing scheme is going to fall flat.

(Don't misunderstand.  Of course the general needs the troops.  It's the way he's going about his request that I object to.  More about that later.  Now, about the choices.)

Warning:  Nobody's going to be happy because NONE of the choices are good. 

Liberals want out, period, and anything less than a complete exit strategy will piss them off, so they might as well quit reading now, because he's not going to pull out. 

Right-wingers want at least 200,000 troops there because that's what Gen. Petraeus's manual calls for, if they are honest, which they never are, but failing that, they'd go for 80,000, which is the high end of what McChrystal REALLY wants, but failing that, then they want 40,000, period.  They're not gonna get it, I can tell you right now, so they might as well quit reading, too. 

Moderates know that the whole situation is so precarious that no matter what we do, it is fraught with risk and low pay-off, so they're going to be pretty miserable all the way around, but hell, I'd like SOMEBODY to read the damn thing.

FIRST OF ALL:

On the time he's taking to come to a decision.

Everybody needs to chill out.

We've been there going on nine years.  Another few weeks is not going to win or lose any damn thing in the Middle East, or Near East or wherever the hell it is.  These people hold grudges for centuries, and anyway, it's going to snow soon so nobody'll be fighting in the mountains anyway.

Bob Woodward and Gordon M. Goldstein wrote an incredible piece for the Washington Post called: The Anguish of Decision, in which they combined conversations each had had with Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy at the end of their lives about the decision-making process that took place inside the LBJ White House regarding the Vietnam War.

Basically, LBJ liked to make a show of meeting with advisors but not really listening to them:

Strategy meetings and conversations on the war were a facade, Bundy said. "The principal players do not engage in anything you can really call an exchange of views. . . . That was prevented by him, and the process he used was really for show and not for choice."

Not only did LBJ not really listen to what his advisors have to say, and generally intimidate them from saying what they really felt, but there were important policy decisions that weren't made at all:

Then as now, the choice of a military strategy was the most crucial decision confronting the president. As Bundy reflected, he bemoaned the failure of civilian leaders to probe and scrutinize the assumptions behind the American strategy in Vietnam -- a strategy that over time devolved into an open-ended war of attrition, an endurance contest the United States was unlikely to win. Bundy frequently observed that in 1965, when the administration decided to initiate a massive deployment of ground combat forces to Vietnam, "we debated a number, not a use."

Agreeing to Westmoreland's plan for a war designed to deplete and degrade the enemy until it capitulated, Bundy concluded, was "a major error, and we failed even to address it."

It wasn't just a matter of civilian leadership not challenging the military or the other way around, but the military leadership didn't question its own strategies:

And he singled out the Joint Chiefs of Staff for particular criticism. "I don't think you'll find any record, secret or otherwise, of the chiefs' critical analysis of the military plans in Vietnam," he said. "And that was a very serious deficiency."

...He added: "We don't have the debate and we don't ask the necessary how-strong-is-the-adversary question," or, as he called it elsewhere, the "will-it-work question."

Now, understand that I'm not including these excerpts because I want my comment section to go all ballistic with historians refighting the Vietnam war.  My purpose is to draw comparisons between the lack of debate around the LBJ Situation Room conference table and what we see taking place now in the Obama White House--the very thing that is being most criticized in the media because it seems to be taking so long, which I find ridiculously ironic.

As Woodward and Goldstein sum it up:

Viewed together, McNamara and Bundy's final reflections suggest a shared vision of some of Vietnam's most critical lessons. The two men conclude that the commander in chief must confront his advisers; the advisers, in turn, must confront the commander in chief. And military strategies proposed by the generals must be examined, deconstructed and, if necessary, directly challenged. McNamara and Bundy show how easy it is to fail at these tasks.

THE DANGERS OF ALWAYS TRUSTING GENERALS

Again, I'm not knocking General McChrystal.  He seems highly competent.  I like what I've read about the man, just as I do General Petraeus, and he seems well equipped for this particular war at this particular time.  I understand the special forces mindset and it's what we need for modern warfare.

I also believe that there was indeed a time during the Iraq war when it was clear, from Rumsfeld on down, that the brass was pressured NOT to ask for what they needed because they were not going to get it, and this resulted in a terrible, terrible cost to our guys in the field, including those in my own family, which made my hatred of those managing that war personal.

So I can understand the knee-jerk reaction now to give them what they want, when they want it.

But when it comes to blind obedience to generals, we would do well to remember that the reason Harry Truman fired General MacArthur was not just because of his insubordination, which was waaay over the top--but because MacArthur wanted to use the atomic bomb in China.

He was sure that would be the way to win the Korean war.

Just a little piece of history trivia to keep in mind.  And one more reminder why the writers of our Constitution gave us a civilian commander-in-chief.

In a great op-ed for the Washington Post, General Fallibility, Richard Cohen draws attention to Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1965, who happened to be Gen. William C. Westmoreland.

Cohen points out that Westmoreland was supposed to be a savior to Vietnam, supposed to pull us out of the quagmire, and how when he spoke before Congress in 1967, he was interrupted by applause 19 times.

A year later, both he and President Johnson were gone.

I am certainly not advocating the same thing here, but I am saying that, as Cohen points out, a general's request should be the starting-point for vigorous analysis--as Woodward and Goldstein point out--and debate--not, as Cohen put it, "some sort of holy writ."

Another level-headed take on "surging" troops is Fareed Zakaria, who wrote, "Think Before Surging," for the Washington Post:

In January, 3,000 more troops, originally ordered by Bush, went to Afghanistan in the first days of the Obama presidency. In February, responding to a request from the commander in the field, Obama ordered an additional 17,000 troops into the country. Put another way, over the past 18 months, troop levels in Afghanistan have almost tripled. Sending an additional 40,000 troops would mean an over 300 percent increase in U.S. troops since 2008. (The total surge in Iraq was just over 20,000 troops.) It is not dithering to try to figure out why previous increases have not worked and why we think additional ones would.

In fact, focusing on the number of additional troops needed "misses the point entirely," says Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander Obama put in place this summer. "The key takeaway" from his now-famous assessment "is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way we think and operate." The quotes are from the third paragraph of his 66-page memo. These changes in strategy have just begun.

Yeah, well, that IS a good point.

We've been "surging" troops for the past year, and in fact, not all the troops who have already been ordered to deploy have even gotten there yet, so all this right-wing screaming that if Obama doesn't make up his mind RIGHT NOW THIS VERY MINUTE we will be FINISHED I TELL YOU DONE is just nonsense. 

Troops are already on their way, and in fact, we are counting on pulling out 4,000 troops from Iraq by the end of this month, and we're stuck waiting to see what Maliki does with that situation before we can act on that.  He was dragging his feet on the election for a while yet but two high-profile bombings may have lit a fire under his ass, so to speak.

Those boneheads seem to think that THE TROOPS just materializes POOF out of a magician's hat someplace but they don't.  Combat troops only number so many, and many of those troops are in rotation.  Some are already deployed and some are in training, awaiting one unit's return from deployments so they can then, deploy, you see?

Even when troops are ordered to deploy, it takes months for the deployment to take place.

You don't just yank a combat troop out of Iraq and ship him over to Afghanistan because a Republican says DO IT.

Idiots.

But I digress.

Zakaria mentions the new strategy and I'm not going to get into all the particulars here, but any of you still reading understand that McChrystal favors a "counterinsurgency" that secures pretty much the entire countryside from Taliban brutality, protecting the populace.  This increases troop casualties but cuts down on inncent deaths because, for one thing, troops do not call in air strikes and artillery, as a rule, nor do they travel as often in armored vehicles or live in big fortified bases.  They live among the people and go on foot patrols among them, and concentrate on training Afghans to protect their own.  They only engage Taliban when fired upon.  Drone strikes are used sparingly and only on absolutely accurate Intelligence.

But it will take a lot more U.S. troops to do this because Aghanistan is a large country even if it is spasely populated.

Biden is more in favor of "counterterrorism" which is more chasing al Qaeda and Taliban bad guys using Predator drones and Special Forces troops and requires far fewer U.S. forces.

Unfortunately, we've pretty much been doing that this past eight years and it's been a dismal failure, resulting in high civilian casualties, hatred toward the U.S. and NATO by civilians, and large Taliban takeover of the country.

Zakaria quotes Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent, and author of FIASCO, about the Iraq war, Tom Ricks:

One option is the idea Ricks recently suggested to me: "Why not do the Petraeus plan [counterinsurgency] for the major population centers and the Biden plan [counterterrorism] for the rest of the country?" Following that middle course might be the most practical solution; more forces could still be needed, as McChrystal suggests, or perhaps we can make do with the almost 100,000 coalition forces already there.

As soon as I read that, I sat straight up and saw the common-sense approach to it that I knew made the kind of compromise sense President Obama likes.

It's not perfect, and the right-wing would immediately start screaming that it's half-ass, but when you really study the situation, it's not, and in fact, it would appear that this might be the way the administration is, indeed, leaning, according to the New York Times:

President Obama's advisers are focusing on a strategy for Afghanistan aimed at protecting about 10 top population centers, administration officials said Tuesday, describing an approach that would stop short of an all-out assault on the Taliban while still seeking to nurture long-term stability.

Mr. Obama has yet to make a decision and has other options available to him, but as officials described it, the debate is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed. The question of how much of the country should fall under the direct protection of American and NATO forces will be central to deciding how many troops will be sent.

At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.

Of course, that's not the whole shebang.  There are other problems.  They're worried about major agricultural areas like the Helmand River valley, as well as what few major regional highways that do exist.

The article states that Gen. McChrystal has already briefed the president and his advisors on how he would deploy any new troops that would be considered, and in an earlier article I have since misplaced, Admiral Mullen has already conducted two Pentagon war-games using not only the 40,000 troops originally requested by McChrystal, but also a war-game using 10-to-15,000 troops as well, and the results of both have been submitted to the White House.

Meanwhile, the State Department is working closely with the Defense Department to break down the ideology of the multiplex of Taliban tribes, which have local, cultural, and ideological--not jihadist--ties.  Many of them, it is believed, can be worked with in much the same way that Sunni tribal warlords in the Anbar province in Iraq were worked with in the Awakening movement that turned the course of the war in 2007 and 2008.

What this does, in effect, is blend the two ideas put forth by Vice President Biden and General McChrystal.

It was part of McChrystal's strategy all along to withdraw the majority of troops into the major population centers anyway, so this in no way works against what he has been trying to do.

There is a great deal remaining, of course, to be worked out, and none of it is ideal, and it all remains to be seen whether any of it will help to stabilize that Medieval country of tribes, warlords, villages, and opium crops.

When President Obama asked General McChrystal for a full assessment of the situation in Afghanistan back in March, and an idea for a strategy with several options, the 20,000, 40,000, or 80,000 troop strategies were the ones put forth by McChrystal in his assessment.

However, in the ensuing time frame, and in McChrystal's own assessment, the full extent of the corruption of the Karzai government came to light, as well as the phony election results, which negated the legitimacy of the government in th eyes of the populace and gave the Taliban more room to propagandize their position.

This makes even McChrystal's own strategy tough to implement, because we need a government that supports us and that we can support, not a corrupt puppet we seem to be holding up.  He acknowledges as much, even as the president's critics ignore it.

This is what makes the choices before Obama so impossible.  Sure, we all want to just get the hell out of that place.  I don't want to lose any of my cherished family members over there, I can tell you that.  But I am a realist.

The Taliban has become powerful enough in their own right that they no longer even need al Qaeda to be their own terrorist organization, as they have proven in Pakistan.  And Pakistan, as we all know, possesses nuclear weapons.  The whole situation is a tinderbox.  We really can't simply pull out now the way we did in the 80's--the repercussions to the entire area would be catastrophic.

Nor can we start from scratch, send hundreds of thousands of troops, and build the whole country up from the ground.  Not now.  Not after eight miserable years of hemorrhaging blood and treasure.

We have to find a middle ground, some way to secure the populace, send over some civilian help, train their security forces--even if we have to pay them--buy off those Taliban who can be bought, if we can--and get the country reasonably stable.

It truly is a matter of national security.  (And yes, al Qaeda is in places like Yemen.  Special Forces is on it already, trust me.)  But this one, this one's big.

And if Obama stands up to General McChrystal and refuses to buckle under the blackmail threat that was hurled at him by McChrystal (or at least, Cheney) loyalists at the Pentagon, he will not be showing weakness at all.  In fact, he will be showing a sign of great strength.

It takes balls to stand up to those shiny stars and say, "Not this time."

The liberals will scream at him for "escalating" the war, and when the conservatives will yell at him for "losing" the war or "half-assing" the war or whatever the hell it is, and Cheney loyalists at the Pentagon will howl that he is making the country dangerously weak, and McChrystal loyalists will mutter (without attribution of course) that it's going to be really tough to "win" the war now...

Yeah, sometimes, it takes more courage to stand up to a general than it does to actually BE one.

"Let me say this clearly so there are no misunderstandings: some of the protests against President Obama are howls of rage at the fact that we have an African-American head of state. I'm sick of all the code words used when this subject comes up, so be assured that I am saying exactly what I mean. Oh, and in response to the inevitable complaints that I am playing the race card--race isn't a political parlor game. It is a powerful fault line in a nation that bears the scars of slavery, a civil war, Jim Crow, a mind-numbing number of assassinations, and too many riots to count. It is naive and disingenuous to say otherwise.

"So when Idaho gubernatorial candidate Rex Rammell jokes about hunting the president or South Carolina GOP activist Rusty DePass calls an escaped gorilla one of Michelle Obama's ancestors, it's racist. Which, in case of confusion, is the "ideology that all members of each racial group possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially to distinguish it as being either superior or inferior to another racial group." (That's from the Oxford English Dictionary, but leave the Brits out of this.) When "Tea Party" leader Mark Williams appears on CNN and speaks of "working-class people" taking "their" country back from a lawfully elected president, he is not just protesting Obama's politics; he is griping over the fact that this country's most powerful positions are no longer just for white men. No, I do not believe that everyone who disagrees with Obama is racist. But racists do exist in this country, and they don't like having a black president."

 

When Raina Kelley wrote those words in Newsweek in her powerful essay, "Play the Race Card," her words were, in themselves, a howl of rage.  And they spoke to me, not just because I agreed with them, but because they'd been spoken, yet again, by an African-American writer.

Ms. Kelley's words joined those of many other of my favorite op-ed writers who happen to be black, like Bob Herbert and Charles M. Blow of the New York Times, and Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, among others.

I wondered if maybe some of us who were white were wandering around, wondering WHAT to say, in a state of the way I felt just then, as if there were silent howls going off in my head.

And even as I was busy accumulating all kinds of links and passion and outrage so that I, too, could join the fray, it was an African American friend of mine who made me think about the issue in a whole other light.

My friend, who I'll call Anne, and I grew close during the Obama campaign and its aftermath, when we learned that we had so much more in common than not, and our frank and funny discussions about race have drawn us closer still.  The long miserable heated days of August upset us both deeply, with the "Obamacare" witch-doctor viral e-mails, the "monkey-see, monkey-do" signs, the "African lyin' in the zoo," and the other unmistakeable manifestations of racism rearing their ugly heads at meetings ostensibly set up to discuss health care, of all things. 

When men began to attend the presidential venues openly sporting loaded firearms, and a congressman thought it just fine and dandy to call a sitting president a liar on national television while he was speaking in front of a joint session of congress--and proceeded to raise nearly two million dollars off the naked insult from folks who thought that was a good thing--my friend and I talked about how we were "wandering around in our heads," filled with despair that, to her, it was 1968 all over again; but to me, it was the early 90's again, just before the Oklahoma City bombing, when I'd been researching right-wing rage and paranoia for a book and had known it was leading up to something terrible.

Either way, it was bad.

And either way, neither of us had dreamed we'd be seeing the likes again.  Not like that.

I told her that I had written about this subject before and that I had this sense of hopelessness that it seemed to make no difference, that here we were, all over again, that nothing ever changed, that the hatred, if anything, was worse--and in a measurable sense. 

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are more than 900 active hate groups in the U.S. today--up from about 600 just a couple of years ago, and militia groups themselves, of the kind I was researching for my book, ORDEAL, have come raging back, with a vengeance, including one which is made up exclusively of former military and law enforcement officers.

The subsequent threats against the first African American president are very real.  According to Ron Kessler's new book, IN THE PRESIDENT'S SECRET SERVICE: Behind the Scenes With Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect, threats against Obama's life have gone up 400% just since he took office in January of this year.

Now, in all fairness to right-wing nutcases, they hated Clinton too.  Oh, Lord how they hated that man and his wife.  They accused him and her of murdering Vince Foster and covering up the crime--didn't just accuse them in some rant or other, but kept up the heat so convincingly that Ken Starr actually dedicated TAX-PAYER DOLLARS AND JUSTICE DEPARTMENT FEDERAL AGENTS INVESTIGATING THE CLAIM before FINALLY DEBUNKING IT--which, of course, did not convince them.

(Years later, I actually saw a guy on TV say that he didn't think the matter had been investigated thoroughly enough.  Well, mister, if Ken Starr ain't thorough enough for you, then I can't help you, man.)

They accused Clinton of running drugs in Arkansas, of using state troopers to procure women for himself, of killing off all his rivals, and God knows, they kept one poor innocent woman in federal prison for, what was it--sixteen months?--because she refused to lie and claim that he had some sort of nefarious thing to do with the whole Whitewater mess?  They spent $65,000,000 taxpayer dollars trying to bring down Clinton and then wound up impeaching him for a blow-job, but I digress.

Obviously that had nothing to do with the color of his skin, so right-wing hatred for anything Not Right-Wing clearly knows no bounds.

But in the Clinton years, FOX news did not exist yet.

Now, Obama has to deal with an entire "news" network that spends, literally, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, attacking him, mocking him, denigrating him, delegitimizing him, smearing him, making up conspiracies about him, and whipping up public frenzy about him.

Toss THAT into the racist pot and see what you get.

It's one thing to refuse to air any of his news conferences.  It's quite another to refuse to air a speech to the joint session of congress.

What they do is, they refuse to air the speech in its entirety, but starting first thing the next morning, they cut-and-past, edit-and-clip little splices that they can put together in the worst possible light, so that they can attack and mock and be outraged at those looping clips for the next week or two.

Then whine like crybabies when he refuses to be interviewd by Chris Wallace.

With Glenn Beck insisting that Obama is racist, that he has a deep-seated hatred of white people--as if his own mother was not white, as if he was not raised by his white grandparents, as if his closet advisors were not white--and with every FOX anchor on their daily line-up encouraging their audience to keep their kids home from school rather than let the president of the United States even speak to them on the first day of school (something which seemed to disturb even Laura Bush)--this is not just racist, it is CORPORATE-SPONSORED RACISM.

And then comes the claim that Obama did not even write DREAMS FROM MY FATHER.

It seems this has been going on since the campaign, a myth begun by both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, that not only did Obama not write this incredible, soul-searching work, but that Bill Ayers, a casual neighbor in Chicago he sat with on a couple of education boards, did.

If I was not already deeply offended from a purely racial standpoint, this...THIS...literally made me recoil, as if I had been physically struck.

As an author, I find this so repugnant, so offensive as to be almost beyond my capacity for comment.

How.  Dare.  They.

What?  The black boy's not capable of writing his own book?  Is that it?

Or is it something deeper?  Is it more along the lines of pure JEALOUSY?

Sometimes, someone will streak across the cosmos like a comet, someone who seems to have everything; looks, athletic prowess, intelligence, Ivy League education, charm, wit, success, even, as in Obama's case, a happy marriage and great kids. 

And when that happens, well, the nasty lit-tle people of the world just have to find something somewhere they can make up or dig up that will make them feel bigger.

In this case, these two boneheads were so certain that Obama's and Ayers's two books were soooo similar that they sent carefully selected segments of them to Dr. Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Hertford College, Oxford, who has designed a computer software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favorite words and phrases.

They offered him $10,000, money which was raised by the brother-in-law to Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah.

First of all, he told them that it was "very implausable" that the two works were by the same author, and that if he were to compare the two books in their entirety as requested, he would have to go public with the results, even if the results were not, er, what they wanted.

So they dropped their little gambit, since it was pretty obvious they were wrong.

Which has not kept Rush Limbaugh OR Sean Hannity from repeating the lie that they now know is not even true.

Okay, so now, I'm wandering around the house in a bloodlust; a red-eyed author's rage.  I mean, Obama's mother was still alive, but had been diagnosed with cancer, when he wrote that book; he got the contract just out of law school because he'd been the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.  He was barely 30 or something when he wrote it.  He wasn't even in politics yet.

Reading that book, I could see that this was a journey of the spirit that is what had given such a young man his beyond-his-years wisdom; it was exactly the kind of soul-searching that George W. Bush NEVER had.

For the likes of Hannity and Limbaugh to slap the authorship onto not just a white man, but THAT white man, so they could couple it with some sort of "radical education" meme of the day or whatever the hell they were after on their hate-rant, made me ill.

Like I told my friend Anne, "I'm already sick of this and it's only been six months.  You guys have been dealing with it for CENTURIES, and far worse, to say the least."

And then she said something that caught me up short.  Something full of grace and light and wisdom; something I think we should all heed, and something I think President Obama would appreciate.

She said:

He is letting us see that he "ain't scared" and we shouldn't be either.  The silent majority is on the side of truth and fairness this time, just like during the campaign.  That's why he was not about to call Joe Ass-hole Wilson a racist.  It would have only made the bigots even more zealous and it would not have done anything at all to convince anyone who didn't see that for themselves.   

He is scheduled to be on all five Sunday morning talk shows and David Letterman on Monday.  No one can rally the troops the way he can and he is signalling the troops to spread the word and to keep the faith.  We can't let him down.     

 

I thought about what my friend had said, and that is why I posted my blog, MY GRANDMOTHER'S CORSET and ALL THOSE EMPTY LIBRARIES, on how we needed to concentrate on getting health care reform passed and not get sidetracked on what Limbaugh or Hannity or any of those Morons of the Day were saying, because Anne was right. 

By letting them set the agenda, we WERE getting sidetracked, whether by racism or whatever other issue, but what Obama needs us to do is get this passed.  

But.   That racism thing.  It's still there. 

And it shouldn't be just the African Americans who have to keep speaking out about it.  We of other colorful or not-so-colorful persuasions should not just be silently howling in our heads.  

As Raina Kelley writes in Newsweek:  

I get it. Race issues are scary. There are few souls brave enough to say what they think about race relations outside the privacy of their homes or the anonymity of the Internet. But rather than deal with the discomfort of talking about race, we've continued to follow outdated rules about what words can be said by whom or, even worse, to stay silent. As if not speaking of racism will somehow make it go away. Silence, even the well-meaning kind, rarely wins an argument. It just allows the lunatic fringe to fill the vacuum in the public debate. And this reluctance doesn't help the effort to achieve racial equality, it hurts it.

 

But maybe silence isn't, after all, so silent.

For example, I raised my kids in the bastion of red-state conservatism, as did my good friend Linda, who hails from South Carolina, State of the Embarrassing Statesmen (I'm from Texas; I can relate.) 

And we both taught our kids to respect everybody based on the content of their character and not the color of their skin or the culture of their background.  Kids of all colors were welcome in our homes--even if it cost us friendships with adult whites in our respective areas.

And it wasn't just us.  Obama has pointed out--rightly so--that this issue is, in many ways, a generational one.  It does not mean that there are not young bigots running around, but it is just as true that the children of racists do not necessarily grow up agreeing with their parents, as was so movingly pointed out by African American blogger, Keli Goff in her Huffington Post blog, "Why I'm Grateful for Joe Wilson and the Fury of Racists":

 

Because the reason some people's racism has been brought to the fore is because the America they thought they knew and loved is becoming a different one before their very eyes; an America in which a Black man can get elected president and a Latina can become a Supreme Court Justice. But most of all an America in which their very own children applaud both. This is what really has racists in a tizzy. Every study shows that most of their children do not share and will not pass on, their legacy of intolerance and hate, but instead may end up dating or marrying an Obama or Sotomayor of their own one day.

You know what else gives me hope? The fact that even in a state like South Carolina where the Confederate battle flag still flies near the entrance to the capitol, citizens have seen fit to punish Congressman Wilson in the polls for the lack of respect he showed our president, who as we all know, is Black. If that's not proof of progress then I don't know what is. So let the racists wail. Let freedom ring and let progress come.

My friend Anne said something very similar in an e-mail to me:

Maybe the history that needs to be stressed right now is not the part that went wrong, but the part that went right. Maybe we should talk more about the white heroes of the abolition movement and the civil rights struggle.  Maybe we should be talking about how everyday there are white Americans out there reaching out to people of color through all kinds of  charitable organizations. 

White America was just as outraged about what happened in New Orleans as black America and many opened up there homes to displaced New Orleaners of all races.  Brad Pitt is building houses down there even as I write this.  Maybe we should fight back with the truth about the harmony that exists among the races, even while acknowledging that there are still problems.  It's kind of like when you were a little kid.  You didn't mind getting yelled at if you did something bad, if you got a "way to go kid" when you did good. 

Now, please don't get me wrong, Dear Reader.  

Especially to my friends of color who are reading this--please PLEASE don't think I'm using this as some kind of excuse to pat all us white folks on the back for Job Well Done!!!  

Because clearly we're not doing such a great job.  

What I'm trying to say is that, there are things that we can all do, things that may not be so readily apparent on the outside, things we can say to our kids at home, for example, that can combat these horrific racist attacks that we see on TV, things that we make clear we will not tolerate in our home.  

There are boundaries we can make clear that we will not cross, say, in the workplace, when e-mails make the rounds.  

We can send them back.  Say, This is not funny.  It is offensive.  Do not send these to me.  

We can, for the thousandth time, NOT LAUGH AT RACIST JOKES.  

I mean, I know this all sounds so elementary and maybe patronizing but goddammit, the stupid stuff keeps coming up, doesn't it?  

The thing is, there really are people out there who do not realize that a viral e-mail may not be true, or that a joke may not be funny.  I know that sounds ridiculous, but many of you reading this live in predominently liberal areas and this may seem self-evident, but when you live in predominently conservative areas, honestly, there are innocents out there who pass a thing along without thinking.   

They don't mean to offend anyone; they're just not thinking about it.  You can make them think without lecturing or hurting their feelings.   Sometimes they are glad to know the truth; I've been told that many times, as long as I use a respectful, and not angry, tone.

We don't have to howl, silently or otherwise.  

But we can speak up.

I'm putting it in a lame kinda way maybe, but Chip Berlet, in an amazing piece that was posted in AlterNet on October 9, 2009, "Why Right-Wing Demagogues Are Trying to Peddle Ludicrous Conspiracy Theories," put it far better:

 

These are the three R's of civil society: Rebut, Rebuke, Re-Affirm: Rebut false and misleading statements and beliefs without name-calling; rebuke those national figures spreading misinformation; and re-affirm strong and clear arguments to defend goals and proposed programs.

That's exactly what President Obama did on in his nationally televised address Sept. 9.

While keeping our eyes on the prize of universal, quality healthcare, we must also prevent right-wing populism as a social movement from spinning out of control. Since Obama's inauguration, there have been nine murders tied to white supremacist ideology laced with conspiracy theories. It is already happening here.

 

I like those three "R's" because those are things that we can do just to respond to those viral e-mails that cross our desk from co-workers, friends, family members, and office workers.

And we can remember that even though it may sometimes seem so grim, that progress IS being made. 

As President Obama joked on Letterman, "I was black before I was elected."  

Millions of white people voted for Obama, as did millions of Hispanics and millions of Asians. 

And yes, I know personally, African Americans who DID NOT vote for him because they disagreed with his politics.  

I think young Ms. Goff, writing in HuffPo, was actually on to something, in that, when titanic change is underway, then those most vehemently opposed to it are going to put up the biggest fight.  

They are going to make the loudest noise.  

BUT that does not mean that they make up the largest number.  

When Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of his glorious dream that one day his children really would be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, just think about this:  

Had he not been assassinated, and had he been allotted a truly long life by the Good Lord, it is conceivable that he could have lived to see a black man take the oath of office as the president of the United States of America, as did a number of the men and women who marched with him back in the day.  

Imagine what he would have thought about that.  

There were haters then, sadly, and they took away his chance to do so, but they did not take away his dream, did they?  

That day has come.  

Let's not let the howls distract us now.  

We overcame before, and we shall do so again. 

 

"I'll never forget how it felt the first time I took off my corset," my grandmother told me one time, years ago.  I was a young mother at the time and she was still with us, still healthy and vital, filled with vinegar and spice.  "I felt so naked."

My grandmother had been a flapper in the '20's, with filmy short skirts and bobbed hair; a divorcee when it was scandalous to be one, tall and willowy and beautiful with fiery hair and cherry lips.  By the time she adopted my mother in 1931, the Depression was full-on, the Texas Panhandle buried in red sand.  Mother's own mother had wasted away with tuberculosis, leaving three little girls in the care of a drunk.  Grandmother, who'd had a hysterectomy in her 20's, took the baby.

Even though her own (second) husband by that time was also an alcoholic, there was nothing wilting about my grandmother.  She ran a prosperous dry-cleaning business in spite of the withering economy.  Mother says she was such an accomplished seamstress that they would go window-shopping on the streets of Amarillo and Mother would point out the prettiest, most stylish dresses on the mannikins.  Grandmother would go home and reproduce them exactly for her, making her one of the best-dressed girls in school for next to nothing.

It must have been hard, running a business, keeping the books, supporting a family, hiding her husband's "problem," raising my mother with her beautiful clothes.  She was strict and imposing.  Mother was terrified of her.

I adored her.

By the time I knew her, she drank whiskey neat, read trashy detective novels, lived independently in her spotless home, and thought everything I did was perfect, a fact which annoyed my mother no end and therefore, caused me no small amount of delight.

Looking back, I can only imagine now how some of the fine upstanding church-going women of Amarillo must have judged my grandmother back in the day.  Her scandalous past.  The fact that she worked outside the home.  She did not go to church, but she dropped Mother off at Sunday School at the First Christian Church every week of her growing-up life.

Of course, when you are working day and night to put food on the table, you probably need Sunday mornings to sew your daughter's dresses for school.  Or to deal with your husband's hangover.

I use my grandmother as an example of what I think is happening in our society right now, and why I think so many of the pundits and pontificators are so far off the mark on so many things, from why so many of Obama's policies are being resisted to why there is so much rage out there.

In order to fully understand what is taking place historically and culturally right now, we need first to examine what took place at the turn of the LAST century--a time also fraught with great unrest and confusion.

In the early 1900's, much of America was an agrarian, small-town society.  Trains and telegraphs made cross-country communication and travel possible, but for the most part, people remained pretty much close to where they had been born and brought up, and life unfolded in pretty much the same way it always had.

But two or three major changes disrupted the fabric of our entire society: the Industrial Revolution (including Henry Ford's automobile assembly line), the invention of the airplane, and World War I.  Those seminal events changed the course of history suddenly and dramatically not just in a sense of overview, but PERSONALLY, in the lives of people like my grandmother and grandfather.

At about the turn of the century, several natural and not-so-natural events also occurred: droughts similar to the Dust Bowl days destroyed many family farms, and at the same time, bank panics similar to what would occur in the Great Depression caused ripples in the economy--all this colluded to drive people out of their small towns and into urban areas, seeking work in the big factories that were springing up with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

But World War I really changed everything.  Young men who went off to that war were sent away with Glory-Days stories ringing in their ears that they'd heard from their fathers and grandfathers of things like Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, or great Civil War battles.  They were truly innocents when they went away across the sea.

But the horrific conditions they faced in the trenches--the first truly mechanized war--was like nothing anyone had ever faced.  Airplanes dropping bombs, even!  The wounds they survived, the battle fatigue they returned with, were like nothing anyone had ever encountered, and it ushered in a cynicism to this country that was modern and grim and quite new.

"How do you keep him down on the farm, once he's seen Gay Paree?" was the refrain, and it was true in many ways, because the entire culture was changing after the war.  Women like my grandmother tossed away their corsets, shortened their skirts, bobbed their hair, went to work, experimented with their sexuality and their freedom, and marched for women's suffrage.

Radios came into people's homes, and popular music, and families began to lose control over what their children saw, heard, and read.

Keep in mind that during this time of great social upheaval, while there was progress on many fronts, there was also this terrible dark side as well--Jim Crow and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as Union busting and riots where many people lost their lives, and terrible poverty and bread lines because there WAS no Social Security, there WAS no Medicare or Medicaid or even any veteran's benefits to speak of. 

In fact, there was one incident in which veterans of World War I, the so-called "Bonus Army," marched on Washington, D.C. demanding benefits that were rightfully theirs, and President Hoover called out the Cavalry and tanks on them.

So there was great violence and upheaval along with social progress, and general anxiety among the population because a way of life that they had thought would never change was not only changing, but changing very quickly.  My grandmother lived to see another world war; she lived to see men walk on the moon; she lived to see women run for political office; she lived to see air travel become commonplace; and polio to be virtually wiped out.

The ladies she knew all shortened their skirts eventually, most even took to wearing pants, as she did.  They all voted.  Many worked outside the home.

Times changed.  Most changed with them.

Now, here we are, at another new century.

The Industrial Revolution, once so cutting-edge, is now rusting out.  Factories are closing, and the towns that sprang up around them and once bustled with life and energy are now boarded up.  People whose families worked in those factories for several generations are now lost, trying to sell houses in empty towns nobody's buying, scared, wondering what to do next.  Wives are working whether they want to or not because they HAVE to.

Change? they scream.  I'll SHOW you change!!!

Meanwhile, another revolution is indeed taking place, as we all know, and that is the Technological Revolution, and it is occurring with lightning speed.  It's one of those things where, if you don't take part in it, you will indeed be left behind, and that can be very scary to many people.

I have a friend, for example, who is in her mid-fifties, very pretty, hard-working, with two great, smart, beautiful grown kids.  But she "doesn't do" e-mail.  She and her husband have cell phones but they "don't do texting," or online social networking.

Recently, her daughter got married, and my friend and her husband often heard ongoing details of things from friends who'd seen them on the wedding website before her busy daughter had had a chance to call home!

How sad for them.  They run a successful business--don't get me wrong.  They do the bookkeeping and things necessary to run their business, but they just refuse to do any of the social networking that young people LIVE on today, and consequently, they are left out of so much of their grown children's lives.

This Technological Revolution is happening--lickety-split--in every area of our lives.  More and more businesses want us to pay bills online.  More and more stores encourage us to either shop online, or use debit or credit cards at the check-out.  Kodak is discontinuing certain types of film; most people use digital cameras now.  Writers send manuscripts by e-mail.

Print newspapers are dying.  More and more people are getting their news not just online, but at their fingertips on their ipods or Blackberrys.

And if that's not fast enough for ya, check out this ABC news report I saw just the other night.

It seems that textbooks and school libraries are disappearing, too.

For the schools who have experiemented with it, lo and behold, they discovered that you can actually give each kid an ipod and a laptop and STILL SAVE MONEY if you don't have to buy textbooks.

Why?

Because, first of all, textbooks are notoriously expensive, and updates cost even more, and second of all, there is so much free information available online.

By blocking social networking sites, they can have some measure of control over what the kids are doing in the classroom, and consequently, the kids are actually more comfortable in the New Century that they have already been inhabiting since grade school anyway.

But in the video version of the story, I must admit that this old English major-slash-writer's heart took a bit of a jumpabump when they walked into the library.

It was barren.

I mean, EMPTY.

No shelves.  No nothin'.  They'd sold the books, cleared out the shelves, and are going to use the space for something else.

By using Kindles and other types of devices, the kids can still read what books they need to read for reports. 

Don't need no steenkin' libraries no more.

Now, see, this is the kind of jolt that is hard on people going into a new century.  This is the kind of change that they fear.  They don't WANT to read a Kindle!

Remember Captain Jean Luc Picard on Star Trek Enterprise?  How terribly quaint he was because he insisted on reading actual BOOKS?

Of course there are plenty of books around.  I'm not writing about the loss of newspapers and books.  Or even folding roadmaps, what with all those GPS's out there.

What I'm saying is that cataclysmic changes are taking place right now.

By mid-century, whites will no longer be the predominent race in this society anymore. 

America will truly be an ethnic blend.

About time, I say.

The American family will look different.  There'll be more of two moms or two dads or single moms or single dads or no kids at all or whatevers.  Cool.

But these (mostly-white, mostly born way back in the last century) people yelling that they want to "bring back my country" are really wanting to bring back a fantasy-TV Mayberry world they remember in their dreamland, a world where there was no molestation of children or spousal abuse or separate-but-not-equal or whatever their gated-community private-Christian white-world fantasy IS--but that is the world they are speaking of.

And it's not coming back.

So many things have been happening so fast that is so scary to so many--scientific discoveries in genetics, biotechnology, biochemestry, quantum physics, astronomy, nanotechnology, and on and on--ever since Dolly got cloned these people have been scared of what is going to happen next.

The great disaster of the Bush presidency was that he was a man of absolutely NO imagination who surrounded himself with graybeards locked into Cold War thinking and McCarthy mindset, who thought nothing of cynically kowtowing to the ignorance and fears of the fantasists (see above) for cash and votes, to the overpowering damage of this nation.

Consequently, they responded to 21st Century problems with 20th Century solutions, with cataclysmic consequences.

The reason so many people seem to fear Barack Obama (fear, remember, is the flip-side of rage), I believe, is that he is a visionary.  He sees several decades ahead, into the future.  He has been thinking in 21st Century terms for at least the past decade; indeed, most likely, he was thinking that way throughout the 90's.

When he campaigned on "change," it's because he understood that THE CHANGE HAD ALREADY COME. 

Obama has always loved to body-surf.  He knew that when the wave of change hits us, we could do one of two things.  If we resisted that wave, fought it, or tried to sleep through it, we would be tossed and tumbled, slammed into the sand, choked--maybe drowned or swept out to sea.

But if we ANTICIPATED that wave, if we positioned ourselves JUST SO...then we could RIDE it.

The problem is...a significant percentage of the population is fighting that wave.  Some of them are good people, like my friends whose daughter just got married.  They cheerfully fail to see the reason to care.  They just do not understand what they are missing, or why it is important.

Some of them are confused, overwhelmed.  They would like to make the change but they don't know how so they refuse to try.

Others fear change of any kind and cling furiously to What They Know.

Others are suspicious, paranoid, angry at any kind of change and will fight it to their dying day, thinking they are doing the right thing.  They're misguided and sometimes dangerous.

Some, like those in Congress, are just opportunistic.  Even if they know he is right, they don't care if it will bring them more cash and/or votes to fight him.

There are a great many of us who see exactly what Obama sees and will work ourselves half to death to try and get the fence-sitters to see it too, because the truth is that there are a great many people out there who are a little bit nervous about all this stuff they see happening, now and in the future, but the truth is that they don't want to be left behind.

It bothers them, too, for instance, that the libraries are emptying out.  But their friend had a Kindle and, they didn't think they would like it, but they had to admit...it was kinda cool.

Maybe they don't agree with EVERYTHING Obama is trying to do, but for the most part, they believe he has the best interests of the country at heart.

Those of us here, those of us who do try to do the convincing...we have to remember what my grandmother said, that first time she tossed away her corset.

She felt so NAKED.

Any time we make a change in our personal lives, it does feel naked, doesn't it?

Any time this country undergoes some sort of change in direction from what we are familiar with, we are all going to feel a little bit nervous, even if it's something we WANT.

I've been fighting for years to put an end to the Iraq war, and I'm glad we're in the process of doing it, but I confess I am nervous about the repercussions of that.  Everything we do, as individuals and as a nation, has consequences that we have to live with.

Obama understands that going without a corset--so to speak--feels naked.  He understands that empty libraries seem sad and upsetting to some--again, hypothetically speaking.

He knows that change of any kind is going to frighten some people and exhilerate others. 

Attacking people for being afraid is beside the point and counterproductive.

The world is changing, and our country is changing too fast for some people to deal with; it's that simple. 

There have been reprehensible reptiles who take advantage of their vulnerabilities and fears in every generation, from Father Coughlin to Joe McCarthy to Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh.  It is a waste of time for us to react and over-react to every little squeak and squawk that comes out of their mouths--what are we, a ping-pong match?

Every time we squawk back at them we give them legitimacy.

In the meantime, we've got this visionary 21st Century president working himself half to death out there, day and night, fighting for health care, for a comprehensive energy policy, for education, to get the economy back on track, and what are we doing?  Fretting about what some red-faced little pissant spewed out last night on TV?

We've got work to do.  Let's git 'er done.

(It's true that we don't all agree on the details; that's okay.  We are all going to have to sacrifice SOMETHING and compromise SOMEWHERE.  That is what a true democracy DOES if it wants to govern.  If you refuse to do that, then you are an idealogue and there is no place for you in a nuts-and-bolts process.)

This world is going to change; this country is going to change; it IS changing, right now, WITH OR WITHOUT US.

Like the president said, We can fear the future or we can shape the future.

What's it going to be?

Yesterday, right before I went to bed, I saw an ominous CNN report that stated that, if the public option was not included in this health care reform package, then "as many as 100" progressive Democrats would not vote for it, and that if the public option WAS included, then as many as 68 conservative Democrats (the so-called Blue Dogs) would vote against it, along with the entire Republican block.

Scary stuff.  If that were true, then clearly we wouldn't get any health care reform at all, which would mean that my daughter and millions of other Americans would still go around with no health insurance at all, even though my daughter--like so many uninsured Americans--works 50 to 60 hours a week.

At three a.m. I woke up, and that was pretty much it for the night.  As I lay there, staring up at the darkened ceiling, I suddenly got this mental image of President Obama, way way up in the circus spotlight, endeavoring a tightrope walk, striving mightily to balance himself with a long pole, but every time that pole dipped toward the right, the audience to the left would scream "TRAITOR! BETRAYOR! LIAR!" and throw old Obama '08 campaign buttons at him; then every time the pole would dip toward the left, the audience to the right would spring to their feet, 9mm firearms strapped to their thighs and AR-15's slung over their shoulders, and shout, "NAZI! HITLER! SOCIALIST! NOT-REALLY-AN-AMERICAN CLOSET TERRORIST PRETENDER! LIAR!"

Below, a phalanx of TV camera crews salivated, close-up lenses focused, waiting breathlessly to see if he would plunge to his death.  Because THAT, of course, would be the real story.

Standing silently in the rain, outside the circus tent, throngs of the uninsured and underinsured, ignored and unseen by the agitated crowds within, held their breaths to see what was to be their fate.  I could see my daughter among them, wet hair plastered to her face, pale from working too hard, as always, and our eyes met, and I knew we could not let her or the rest of them down.

And so, we Americans remain poised in this trembling moment of history, and wonder what is to become of all of us.

I did try to go back to sleep, but I could not get that mental picture out of my mind.  Finally, when there was enough light for me to get up and move around without disturbing my sleeping husband (nothin' keeps that man awake), I turned on the computer and went to work.

It could not be that simple, I determined.  It could not be that either-or, that black or white.  Nothing ever is, no matter how cut-and-dried the news packaging is.

And what I found not only informed me beyond most of what I've seen in coverage of this debate, but actually served to soothe my fears considerably, so naturally, I'm passing it on to you guys.

First of all, the bad news.

One thing I love about TPM Cafe is that most of the participants are very well informed and well educated, so I don't need to reiterate what many of you already know:  that the votes for the public option are not there.

Still, that matter is up for debate--I've seen both sides--so I turned to someone whose voice I learned to trust implicitely during the campaign--Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight.com.  His analysis:  Life After the Death of the Public Option, is the single most comprehensive--and enlightening--explanation of what that actually means that I have found anywhere. 

It not only makes sense, but if offers encouragement.

First he breaks down, vote by vote, in the House and the Senate where the problem exists and why it's real.  "It's an unpleasant truth," he states, "But just because it's an unpleasant truth does not mean that it's not the truth."

Then, he explains why health care reform without a public option is still reform:

 

Forget politics for a moment -- what about from a policy standpoint? The fundamental accomplishments of a public option-less bill would be to (1) ensure that no American could be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition or because they became sick; (2) subsidize health insurance coverage for millions of poor and middle-class Americans.

These are major, major accomplishments. Arguably, they are accomplished at too great a cost. But let's look at it like this. The CBO estimates that the public option would save about $150 billion over the next ten years -- that's roughly $1,100 for every taxpayer. I'm certainly not thrilled to have to pay an additional $1,100 in taxes because some Blue Dog Democrats want to placate their friends in the insurance industry. But I think the good in this health care bill -- the move toward universal-ish coverage, the cost-control provisions -- is worth a heck of a lot more than $1,100.

He then explains why ramming through a public-option bill in the House would still wind up in defeat in the Senate, and why the cost in the long run would be too high--and I'm not talking money-cost.

He also addresses the all-or-nothing stance of the ideologues among us that Dems have to take a stance somewhere and that if not here, then where???

 

But don't progressives need to draw a line in the sand somewhere? I'm sympathetic to this argument from a game-theory standpoint. But (1) lines in the sand won't mean anything if they're washed to sea by a wave-like 2010 election; and (2) I'm not persuaded that the lack of progressive willpower is responsible for compromises on bills like health care, climate, and the stimulus package. The stimulus package passed the House with only 26 more votes than were required for passage and had just one vote to spare in the Senate. The cap-and-trade bill passed with just one extra vote in the House and has yet to pass the Senate (and probably won't). A health care bill, even under somewhat best-case scenarios and even without a public option, is unlikely to gather more than about 230-240 votes in the House and perhaps 62-64 in the Senate.

It doesn't seem to me as though the Democratic leadership (including President Obama) is unnecessarily watering down bills for the sake of achieving a "bipartisan" outcome. It seems, rather, that they're calibrating things relatively well, and squeezing about the most juice they can out of these initiatives given the institutional imperatives of the Congress

 

Of course, we don't have to accept anything as unchangeable when it comes to politics, and Silver takes note of that fact:

 

By all means, try to change those institutional imperatives. Organize primary challenges against Senators and Representatives who are too conservative relative to their districts; these can have somewhat dramatic -- if probably somewhat temporary -- effects on Congressional behavior. Try to build some momentum against the filibuster. Expose Senators and Representatives who are voting against the best interests of their district because of special-interest money. Push Democrats to end the seniority system in its selection of committee chairs and floor leaders. And work on shifting the Overton window where you can. But I don't think the problem is that progressives are disempowered. It's simply that they don't constitute a majority. Non-Blue Dog Democrats make up 47 percent of the House. They probably do make up a majority of the Senate (although this is arbitrary; the Blue Dogs aren't formally active in the upper chamber), but in the Senate, a mere majority isn't good enough -- you need a supermajority

 

Finally, Silver holds out hope that I do not think we should dismiss out of hand just because of our own impatience:

 

Incrementalism seems to be a popular meme these days -- could the public option do better as a standalone provision? While bearing in mind that bargaining is the third stage of grief, this seems to me to be a somewhat realistic hope, especially if Barack Obama is elected to a second term. If a health care reform bill passes, then the government will paying for private insurance coverage for some low-to-middle income individuals. This will tend to give everyone a more direct interest in cost containment: if a low-income family's insurance coverage is costing more than it should because of the absence of competition from a public option, it will be the taxpayers making up the difference. Of course, there would be some people arguing to blow the whole thing up entirely for this reason. But if someone then proposed a public option -- a provision that would spare $150 billion from the public dole and which would give consumers more choices -- it would seem to have a fairly compelling case. Part of the problem the public option faces is that it's a somewhat popular, cost-reducing measure which is mired in a somewhat unpopular, thousand-page, $900 billion bill. When taken as a standalone measure, its cost savings would be more transparent and its opponents would have less ability to confuse the public about its costs and benefits.

 

Now, I know some of you out there already have your blood boiling over this because you think if we don't do EVERYTHING now then we will never get another chance in most of our lifetimes to do it AT ALL.

Hang in there with me.  I know it takes longer than the av-er-age blogpost to read through my stuff, but I promise to make it worth your while.

First, a defense of the Obama administration strategy, which I found in the L.A. Times: "Obama's Health-Care Trade-Off."

The article begins by pointing out that so many aspects of health insurance reform that is included in all versions of the bill, such as not being denied due to pre-existing conditions, is not necessarily set in stone, and that by compromising on something like the public plan, Obama gets far greater leverage to insist on across-the-board reform, particularly with conservative Dems and so-called "centrist" Dems, as well as with a tiny handful of Republicans, (who, in spite of their rhetoric, will not all vote en masse against something that they know could really hurt them in the next election).

 

Centrist Democrats on Monday said they welcomed the new White House flexibility.

Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.), a second-term lawmaker from a swing district, said: "It's going to bring votes." Altmire, who was one of three Democrats to vote against the bill in the House Education and Labor Committee, said that the government plan had "become a flash point."

Families USA Executive Director Ron Pollack, a leading consumer advocate who has been pushing a healthcare overhaul for decades, said his group had been distributing a memo touting the "10 Reasons to Support the Health Care Reform Bills." A government plan was only one of them.

"The health reform bills have many critical factors designed to make healthcare more accessible and more affordable," Pollack said in an interview. He and others noted that the bills working their way through the House and Senate included provisions that would transform the way Americans get health insurance -- even without a government plan.

"The public plan is not the essential element of reform," said Jim Kessler, vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank in Washington.

When it comes to strategy, many lawmakers long have seen a concession on the government-run plan as essential to getting any healthcare bill through the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to ensure passage.

All 40 Senate Republicans oppose the public option, as do some Democrats. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has been working to overcome political obstacles in the Senate, where a small bipartisan group of lawmakers has been trying to reach a compromise.

"While Sen. Reid supports a public option, he also supports bipartisan compromise healthcare reform that cuts cost and provides coverage for all Americans," said Reid spokesman Jim Manley. "There are different proposals on the table that can accomplish that goal."

Which leads of course, to the obvious question, and that is, What about those progressives and liberals who are counting on a public option?

First, the bad news:

 

Obama's willingness to jettison the public option if necessary risks alienating some in his liberal base.

Jed Lewison, a liberal blogger, said that if a healthcare bill passed without a government-run program, grass-roots support for future Obama objectives may be more tepid.

"People's intensity will definitely diminish," Lewison said. "People have been listening to strong arguments for the public option coming from the administration. And they believe those arguments. If it comes down to where people feel like in the last few yards of the field, the rug was pulled out from underneath them, and they may not be as willing to work hard the next time around."
 

Lord knows, that's putting it mildly.  Read a few headlines on progressive blogs or tune in to shows like Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz and you'll get an earful of rage every bit as scathing as what Obama faces on the right.

But see, this is where you have to think outside the box, shake off that "either-or" mindset, and study a little bit of history while you are at it.

In Newsweek, Jonathan Alter analyzes not just how Obama should sell health care reform, but how this bill compares with a few other pieces of landmark legislation of the past:

 

History suggests that major social policy unfolds on a continuum. The Social Security Act of 1935 disappointed liberal New Dealers because what was called "old-age insurance" covered only about half the adult population. It excluded farmhands, domestics, employees of small businesses, and most blacks. That was because FDR needed the votes of Southern Democrats, the Blue Dogs of their day. (The bill cleared the House Ways and Means Committee with only one Republican vote.) Similarly, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, immortalized in Robert Caro's Master of the Senate, was weak tea. It had to be strengthened by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the later bills, Lyndon Johnson betrayed Southerners he had made deals with in 1957. If Nancy Pelosi can't break Rahm Emanuel's promise to Big Pharma's Billy Tauzin this year, she can try to break it in the future. And Tauzin will lobby for more favors as the all-important new regulations are issued. Nothing in Washington is ever set in stone.

The only thing that should be unbreakable in a piece of legislation is the principle behind it. In the case of Social Security, it was the security and peace of mind that came with the knowledge of a guaranteed old-age benefit. (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush got slam-dunked when they tried to mess with that.) In the civil-rights bills, the principle was no discrimination on the basis of an unavoidable, preexisting "condition" like race.

The core principle behind health-care reform is--or should be--a combination of Social Security insurance and civil rights. Passage would end the shameful era in our nation's history when we discriminated against people for no other reason than that they were sick. A decade from now, we will look back in wonder that we once lived in a country where half of all personal bankruptcies were caused by illness, where Americans lacked the basic security of knowing that if they lost their jobs they wouldn't have to sell the house to pay for the medical treatments to keep them alive. We'll look back in wonder--that is, if we pass the bill.

 

Again, I hear you out there, screeching at me that if we don't do it NOW, we will NEVER do it.

I do not, however, hear any howling about HOW it is to get done.

And that, my friends, is where the divide-and-conquer part comes in.

Today's Huffington Post blog, "The News of Its Death is Greatly Exaggerated," by Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is the smartest, savviest, shrewdest thing I've read yet on this subject.

First, he draws a scenario about what will happen if progressive Dems hold their ground, against all odds, to pass the bill as they want it to stand:

 

1. The House will find the votes to pass a comprehensive bill with a public option soon after they get back from August recess. That will be reasonably easy, because Pelosi will be able to peel off a reasonable number of Blue Dogs, many of whom have said they would support a public option, to vote for the bill.

2. The Senate will find the votes to pass a convoluted, tortured, unworkable bill, not only with no public option but so messed up and compromised to be unworkable anyway. This is less certain than number one, but Democrats will probably find a way to pass something.

3. The conference committee will sit for several weeks as Senators like Conrad say we will never pass a public option, House progressives says we will never pass something without a public option, and the White House, Pelosi, Reid, and conference committee members work out details to try to get something passed.

 

At that point, either the bill is dead, which would be an act of suicide for Democrats in both houses, OR, they look for a much smarter, clever way to get it done without having some sort of OK Corrall gunfight.

Lux writes:

 

A. The first is that conservative Senators are given a fig leaf compromise on the public option, so that they can say to people they forced a compromise, and then are brought over with all kinds of other incentives that make them more comfortable with the bigger bill.

B. The second is that the conference committee simply breaks the bill in half, one half being the less controversial part that everyone agrees upon, the other being the public option and the financing, both of which can go through the reconciliation process. Then Obama and Reid muscle the 50 votes they need for support.

 

WHAT was that again?

Break the bill IN HALF???

Lux says, not only yes, but HELL yes:

 

None of this is easy, and none of it is pretty, but having been through a ton of these kinds of issue fights, both from inside the Clinton White House and from the outside, I can tell you that all of this is doable. These kinds of rhetorical logjams happen all the time, where it looks like the House and the Senate are both unalterably dug in, and then magically deals get done. On important bills, effective Presidents and Congressional leaders find some tough-to-thread-the-needle sweet spot, or they use some uncomfortable or inelegant legislative tool, and things that matter can get done. The media and establishment conventional wisdom, which always tends toward the dire and toward the conservative scenarios, is sometimes proven wrong. So ye of little faith, do not give up hope. The worst thing sometimes happens, but not always. Politicians sometimes sell people out, but not always. Keep fighting for the public option.

 

So, again, I think that in many instances of liberal outrage, part of the problem is simply a basic lack of understanding about how the legislative process can work--and I include myself in that group, because I didn't have a clear picture of it myself until I did my homework. 

It does not have to be all-or-nothing, now-or-never.

There are nuances and options of all sorts to accomplish the same basic goals.  In the final analysis, I'm looking up at Obama on that tightrope, right?  And I know that sometimes that pole will dip toward the left, and sometimes it will dip toward the right, but eventually, he will stabilize it into a balanced, horizontal hold that will enable him to get to his destination.

And sure, the media-types will be disappointed, because they were hoping he would fall, since it makes a better B-roll story, and there will be die-hards on both sides who won't be happy no matter HOW he gets across that rope...but when the spotlight fades, and the audience's attention will be held, spellbound, by the next act...listen. 

Listen closely.

You will hear it.

Cheers...wafting in from outside the tent, as all those people standing out in the rain realize that the storm is over, and they can come in out of the cold.

 

I spent this past week cleaning out a closet.

On the surface of it, that doesn't seem like such a big deal, other than the fact that it really did take me four days to do it.  It wasn't because there was so MUCH stuff in the closet--it's what was IN the closet that was the problem.

Our reasons for procrastinating must-do chores are often more complex than we may realize.  We say we don't have time, or maybe we're honest and admit that we just don't wanna do it. 

But sometimes, what may seem to be a simple household chore can really be a wrenching, emotional one.

I once had a friend whose twin girls were both stillborn.  The doctor had known the babies were dead for the better part of a month, but had insisted she carry the infants to term and give birth normally.  While she was still in the hospital, her husband had the babies buried, thinking, I'm sure, that he was somehow sparing her the ordeal of facing the nightmare she'd been dealing with for weeks.  I believe he meant well.

Instead, he denied her the proper chance to say good-bye.

But I knew that the worst was yet to come, and one day, I visited her, and I said, "I'll help you box up the room."

She burst into tears.

Of course, she had known that she would no longer be needing the double cribs or the pretty rocker or the white changing table or the adorable prints she'd lovingly hung on the happy yellow walls she'd painted.

The difficult birth had rendered her, in the end, unable to bear more children--yet more heartache--and although they did adopt a son later on, that would be years away from the time the two of us stood in the sweet empty nursery, cardboard boxes in hand.

You see, I'd known that, even though her husband considered the matter dead and buried, so to speak, it would be the bereaved mother who would know that the hardest chore of all still lay ahead of her.  And I knew she would not have the strength to do it alone.  I also knew that, much as her husband loved her, she needed a woman just then.

So, together, we took down the cribs and packed away the pink baby clothes and stored the sweet wall-hangings.  We talked.  We cried.  We grieved.  And she took the first, brave step in her young life of moving forward, somehow.

Sometimes, a simple household chore can be the hardest thing you've ever had to do.

Most of you know that I used to write suspense thrillers; I had ten published over the years, and one true-crime.   My trademark was serious research, and my work took me all over the country, working with police officers, forensic specialists, sketch artists, attorneys, federal agents, Texas Rangers, gunsmiths, self-defense experts, computer-crime specialists, worldclass computer hackers, fire fighters, arson investigators--you name it, and I probably knew someone in the field who had worked with me researching that subject.

It was such a privilege, being trusted by those professionals.  They took me riding patrol in inner-city crime-ridden areas, walked me through autopsies, took me to the gunrange, taught me how to take fingerprints, allowed me to sit with victims during forensic sketching sessions, permitted me to listen to taped interviews of notorious subjects, invited me to attend a law enforcement seminar on cult crimes, took me on stakeouts, and the fireguys suited me up in turn-out gear and took me through training fires--on the nozzle!--

My contacts in law enforcement and arson investigation showed me stuff I probably should not have seen, and spoke to me, at length, about the trials, tribulations, and joys of their work.

At one time, I was even invited to attend an advanced homicide seminar attended by experienced detectives and investigators and feds of all stripes.  We worked with cadaver dogs, forensic entymologists, homicide investigators, and forensic anthropologists for that course.  In the evenings, I was permitted to sit in on confidential case exchanges and to sift through criminal files of ongoing investigations.  This is because they knew they could trust me, and they knew that when I did write whichever book I was working on, my representation of law enforcement officers would be fair and accurate.  Some of my biggest fans were cops.

I loved every minute of it.

Breaking into New York publishing was, in some ways, much harder than winning the trust of hard-core cops.  After years of freelancing articles, I wrote three book manuscripts before finally getting a book deal, which also resulted in a movie option, although the story never made it to screen. 

In the end, it was not the quality of my work, or anything I did wrong in any way, that brought down my career.  It was current events over which I had no control.  For the better part of a year, I'd been researching and writing a story about a group of far-right extremists who plot to bomb a federal building because they consider themselves to be at war with the U.S. government.

I was 400 pages into the manuscript when the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was bombed by Timothy McVeigh and his loser cronies.

My own publisher of five previous books rejected the manuscript, saying, "We don't want it to look as though we're taking advantage of the bombing."

The publisher who eventually bought ORDEAL paid a high-five figure advance for it and pronounced it, "the perfect suspense thriller."  Foreign rights sold for thousands more.  It was optioned for a movie.  When it was eventually published, every review was a rave.

But the publisher made a tactical error, dragging their feet, and not publishing the book until two years after I'd finished it, which put it smack in the middle of the McVeigh trial.

People were sick of the subject by then, and sales tanked.

Within two weeks of publication, the publisher had renigged on their contractual agreement to bring out my next book, TIGHTROPE as a hardcover; rather, it came out as a paperback original.  And for my final thriller, TORCH, they paid TEN TIMES LESS than what I'd earned for ORDEAL.  The promised movie was never made.

Because foreign versions were still coming out during the next few years, and because we were still making random sales like Books on Tape--I didn't realize that it was over, really.

I didn't GET that the publishing industry is not about words.  It's about NUMBERS, and if you don't have the numbers, they won't let you write the words.

After that, I submitted a book proposal to my agent about drug lords buying up ranches on the Texas side of the border and terrorizing owners so they could have an uninterrupted flow of drugs back and forth across the border.

He said, "Nobody cares about the border."

This was, oh, about 1998.  I suppose he was right, at the time.

After that, I fired that agent, found a new one, and then I teamed up with a retired CIA agent and we wrote a Tom Clancy-style thriller about how the governor of Texas goes on to become president, and travels to a border town to dedicate a new medical clinic with the governor.  But terrorists have snuck what my spy friend referred to as a "dirty bomb" across the border and are planning to release it at the ceremony.  The only thing stopping them was a top-secret, elite group of counterterrorism experts taken from all the alphabet agencies and known only to the president and the national security advisor.

This was...oh, about 2000.  And the editors and agents in New York did not find our scenario believable.

And so on.  Year after year, this was my life of intense frustration and near-madness. 

During that time, the publishing industry was undergoing convulsions of its own, and the rejection letters from some of the editors left me completely baffled.  They'd rave for three paragraphs and then nitpick for one or two, but rather than trust me to fix those things in revisions, they'd reject the book outright.

A third book, about the grown son of a Charles Manson character who has hidden his identity all his life and suddenly finds everything he's ever worked for threatened by dear old dad--was rejected in just that way.

Ten years.  It took me that long to get it through my thick skull that I was through writing suspense thrillers.

I mean, you're supposed to have all these qualities to "make it" in the writing business, like persistence and determination and courage and hard work.  Well, it's those same characteristics that make it that much harder to finally give up.

But give up was what I was eventually forced to do.

For me, the death of a dream was very similar to a death in the family; I grieved for the loss of the work I had loved so much, for the sense of accomplishment and pleasure it had given me.  I grieved for the loss of who I was when I was living that life--the travel and the adventure and the fun.  During that time, I was a popular speaker at writer's conferences all over the place, and that was fun in a different way, sharing the podium with some of the bestselling authors of that time, shutting down the hotel bars with fellow wordsmiths.

The laughter.  The competitiveness.  The cool-kids-table feeling of it all.  The friendships.

When my career imploded, most of my writer friends vanished into thin air--it was as if they feared if they got too close to me, that what had happened to me was somehow contagious and it might happen to them, too.  Publishers were cutting their lists by the hundreds, and not just writers were losing work--editors and publishers were also being laid off.

In one year's time, I lost $65,000 in earning capacity, and we went broke before going broke was cool.

The stress ground me down.  The isolation--some of it self-imposed--narrowed my world considerably.

Over the years, most of the law enforcement officers with whom I'd worked so closely retired.

My family worried about me a great deal, because when a writer does not write, a soul-death takes place, and they shrivel.  It is during this time that many of them turn to drink or drugs or promiscuity or all three.  Marriages break up.

My drama was far more internal.  At one point, I spent six months planning my suicide.

Other tragedies struck.  Two of my son's friends died before the age of 20.  My best friend died of cancer at 46, leaving two motherless children behind.  Both my kids went away to college, and I spent hundreds of hours poring over student loan forms, trying desperately to keep them in school even as I missed them with every fiber of my being.

It's as if my mojo vaporized.

At some point, I stumbled into a therapist's office for help.  My insurance policy at the time covered a grand total of ten sessions, so she had to work fast, God bless her, but help me she did.  By the end of our time together, I showed her that I was writing again, and she cried.

Don't know what that means, exactly, when a gal makes her therapist bawl, but what're ya gonna do?

I wrote a final book, a true-crime, with the Houston Police Department's forensic sketch artist, Lois Gibson, and although it was done entirely in her voice, it was some of my finest writing, which helped repair my tattered and shredded confidence to some extent.  Patched it up, anyway.

And then my son, following his college graduation, joined the Marines and went off to fight a war I opposed.  When he came back from that first deployment, he took some of his combat pay and bought me a brand-new computer for Mother's Day.

"Use your gifts," he said.  "Speak out."

So with his full support and blessing, I started blogging, speaking out against the war in Iraq, which I did for several years, until Barack Obama burst on the scene, and then I turned my talents to doing what I could to get him into the White House--it was the best chance I could see for eventually ending the war.

It's been five years, now, that I've been writing, for free, on all sorts of subjects.

But no more suspense thrillers.

The closet beside my desk was filled with excruciatingly well-organized files on every subject imaginable, from criminal profiling, to hand-to-hand combat, to explosives, to terrorism and counterterrorism, to investigative procedures, to the nature of fire and its suppression--honestly, you name it and I had information on it.

I knew I wasn't going to write any more thrillers.

I knew most of my contacts were out of the business, themselves, by now.

I knew most of the information I'd collected through the years was now dated, and that anything I might need to know at some future point, I could find online.

I knew I needed the room, because now I've got all this information on the war, on strategy and tactics of modern warfare, insurgency and counterinsurgency, and on the campaign and opening months of the Obama administration.  I needed a place to put that stuff.

I needed to clean out my closet.

First thing is, you don't expect to cry, but you do.

Every file had a story--usally a cop, or a Texas Ranger, or SOMEBODY who had trusted me with the information.

There were letters.  From fans.  From agents.  From editors.

Contracts.

Cover-flats.

Letters from bestselling authors who had mentored or otherwise befriended me through the years.

E-mail print-outs of encouragement from my kids--my heart, soul, and joy.

Snapshots of another Deanie in another time.

Everything had to be sifted through. 

Most of it I threw away.  About ten percent of it I kept for sentimental reasons or because I might need documentation for something or other someday.  You never know.

But most of it went into bulging Hefty bags.

Files were re-labeled.  My Obama stuff stored neatly away.  I even bought some of those dandy little plastic drawer-storage-thingies.

It took four days because it was hard.

I thought about all the people who have closets to clean out for sad, sad reasons.  People who've lost a loved one and must face the terrible task of going through their things.  People who've gone through divorce and must divide and conquer.  People who've lost their homes and must move into cramped apartments where they have nowhere near the storage room.  Elderly people who must turn away from a lifetime because they are no longer capable of caring for their own things.

Cleaning out a closet can be a very sad thing.

I thought, when I was finished, that I would feel this great sense of relief, a lightness of being, an excitement for the unknown future.

I didn't feel that way.

But I knew that, ultimately, I would not be able to rebuild any sort of new life until I had the guts to box up and store away the old.

It's a letting-go.  A turning-away.  A moving-on.

I decided to tell my story here--long though it may have been--because times are hard right now and there are many, many people having to clean out closets, so to speak, right now.  Most of them, like me, never dreamed they would have to.  Most of them were unprepared, as I was.  Most of them wish that their cluttered closet was like the magical wardrobe of Narnia, where we can walk in, shut the door, and relive every happy moment we once spent in that small space.

In the end, I put up a corkboard in the closet, and on that board, I pinned photos of me taken in my youth by a young writer who did a profile on me for a magazine.  I'd been posing at my desk, fingers on keyboard, or leaning against my book-lined shelves, looking very writerly.

And in the middle, I pinned up an old postcard I'd once bought because I found it funny:  A skeleton, sitting at an old Remington typewriter, covered in cobwebs, but still writing.

Because ultimately, writing is not what I DO, it is WHO I AM. 

I think that, when we clean out those closets, it's a good time for us to think about just who we are, who we mean to be, and who we could be in the years remaining to us on this planet.

My friend who lost two babies so tragically was, after all, a mother.  She did adopt a baby boy and raised him, with her husband, to be a fine young man.  Losing those infants did not take away from her her own mothering abilities; she still had so much love to give.

Losing my career did not take away from me what talents, gifts, and skills I have.  I can still use them as I always did: to inform, educate, entertain, or inspire.

What closet do YOU need to clean out?

And when you are done, who are you, finally?  Can you still be that person, but in another way?

Or is your closet-cleaning a rebirth of sorts, to help you become the person you were always meant to be?

Every day now, I open my closet just to look inside for a few moments.

One thing I did, deliberately, is I left one of the little plastic drawers empty.

It's just about the right size for a book manuscript.

I don't know yet what that might be.  I know what it WON'T be.  And I know what it COULD be.

And for now, that's enough.

When George W. Bush took office in January of 2001, Talking Points Memo did not exist.

Huffington Post did not exist.

Buzzflash.com did not exist.  (Update: Buzzflash.com did exist, as of May of 2000, the first that I know of.)

Keith Olberman did not yet have a political program on MSNBC.

Rachel Maddow did not yet have a political program on MSNBC.

That Ed guy for sure didn't yet.

However, FOX news, Rush Limbaugh, and many of the other Lords of the Right-Wing Air dominated discourse, drove the political narrative, and basically provided a controversy-free platform for anything and everything the Republican president wanted to do with his Republican congress. 

In fact, they made it their business--or I should say, busine$$--viciously attacking anyone who DARED oppose their god and savior, Bush, and his wondrous disciples, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.  To disagree even on minor points was to indulge in "Bush-Bashing."

Most people don't remember this, but Bush's first few months in office were so unremarkable that most pundits didn't think he'd last past a first term.  Once he and his minions had rammed through massive tax cuts for all their buddies and benefactors, Bush drifted along, musing about Star Wars and privatizing Social Security, while his evil twin, Karl Rove, moved into the West Wing and set about politicizing the entire government.

Once 9/11 happened, the Lords of the Right-Wing Air freaked out along with their paranoid political bosses, sketching nightmare scenarios, shoving wars and rumors of wars down the country's collective throat with nary a voice, except for maybe Al Franken, to stop them. 

(Rembember, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them?)

When I first started prowling around, looking for sympathetic sites other than just the DNC, it was during the presidential campaign of 2004, and Talking Points Memo was just getting cranked up.  HuffPo didn't exist yet.  Buzzflash was already out there, along with a few others, like Media Matters.  Keith Olberman had gotten underway. 

And of course, Jon Stewart, God bless him.

(This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive list, believe me, and I'm not providing links and specific dates because this is just an opening, not the point of the post.  I'm getting there.  Bear with me.)

As their first term waned, Bush/Cheney and their wars and their spying on Americans had finally awakened a sleeping giant, and the pushback came very near to unseating him that November. 

(Stealing Ohio helped.  But I digress.)

By 2006 the outrages had spiraled damn near out of control.  From New Orleans to Abu Ghraib, there was virtually no part of this planet that had not been royally screwed by that administration in one way or another, and the Internet became, for those of us to the left of the aisle, what talk-radio and television had been for the right in the 90's.

In 2007, when the presidential campaign got underway, opposition to All Things Right-Wing was in full-throated howl, and during the contentious contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I noticed a trend among not just pundits and pollsters and pontificators, but also among politicians--of underestimating Obama.

In the beginning, they positively sneered.

While everyone acknowledged his public speaking gifts, they also mocked them, claiming that his inspirational speeches were "just words" and that he was basically a brash young upstart.

It wasn't racism so much as it was the classic, "Go away, kid.  Ya bother me."

I saw it, from the beginning, as a generational showdown.  In her final column for Newsweek, Anna Quindlan mentioned something her grown son had said regarding baby boomers in various careers:  "You guys just don't quit."

What he meant was that baby boomers were clutching the levers of power in their cold, dead hands, so to speak, and were not letting go so that the next generation could step up and take their places.  You see the truth of this in the Sunday morning news talk shows--most of the people sitting around a given table on-set are 50 and over.

Quinlan said she didn't want to be one of those people, so she was letting go so that some bright young voice could take her place.  (Although I haven't noticed Newsweek's moving in that direction as of yet.)

Obama's methods of running a campaign were revolutionary, 21st century stuff--that is common knowledge now, and is being mimicked in elections all over the world.

But all through it, time and time again, he was not taken seriously.  Even after he finally won the nomination, McCain and his people spoke of him in derisive, dismissive terms.

And when Obama won with a powerful mandate, there was this massive sort of clanking of the old gears of government, oiled by the grumblings of a whole set of congresspeople and senators and governors and lobbyists and--most especially--columnists and op-edders and pundits and pontificators...who just could not seem to believe it.

(So entrenched was this view that the lunatic fringe even invented a scenario where he didn't DESERVE to have the office he'd won in such a hard-fought way, because, after all, he's not REALLY one of us, is he?  Not a REAL American, like Sarah Palin.  It was all apparently some kind of gigantic conspiracy involving doctors, nurses, and state officials in Hawaii to cover up his fake birth certificate because they somehow knew that the little black baby with a white mama and a father who left town would somehow grow up to be president more than 40 years later.)

But what makes Obama's job so much more difficult, actually, is that Democrats, unlike Republicans, do not march in lock-step with a top-down directive on What to Believe Today. 

Instead, they're as likely to shout at each other as they are to right-wingers.

I turned on the "Ed Show" the other day and he was practically spitting in his excitement over health care, saying that if it did not get passed with a public option, that we would need to "form a third party" because this one was too conservative for liberals like him.

I'm not arguing his point one way or the other.  I'm simply using it as an example of the broad spectrum of points of view within the Democratic party.  Some "Blue Dogs" are actually conservative enough to be Republicans; some moderates can swing either way, and some liberals are just as rabid in their all-or-nothing ideals as the right-wingers are of theirs.

What that means is that, on any given day, you can turn on Glenn Beck over at FOX news and see Obama raked over the coals for being weak on national security or being dictatorial on his domestic plans, and then switch over to Rachel Maddow and see him attacked for being "too much like Bush" in matters of national security or too weak in implementing his domestic program.

Opposite criticisms for the same policies!

In my memory, I've never seen a president under such an assault of constant criticism from all sides, on one thing or another, in all the years I've been following politics.  (I have a journal I kept in high school where I was fretting over something LBJ had done, so that's been a while.)

The most amazing thing of all, to me, is that this 24-hour barrage of criticism, complaint, and counterargument has led to a sort of hyper-speed, where time seems to whip past so fast it's in a basic blur.  We're all connected, all the time.  Texts and Tweets and e-mails and constantly-changing news sites like Huffington Post are now just a touch away on the phones that fit in our pockets, and no matter whether it is a straight news site like the New York Times or a political site like Firedoglake, we are invited to express our opinions on a given matter.

And what that means is that, four months into a brand-new administration, one that inherited such a staggering plethora of constant crises both here and overseas, not seen since FDR took the oath, it seems that, on any given issue, if Obama has not YET fulfilled a campaign promise or brought about a historic and legendary piece of legislation or turned the economy completely around--well then, he's just a failure.

Josh Marshall poked fun of that mindset right after the election when, after 18 months of 24/7 campaign coverage, he took a week off with his family, and returned with a headline that said something like, "OBAMA IS A FAILURE," joking that, in a week's time, he'd already been pronounced DONE by the hyped-up pundits coming down from an adrenaline-rushed campaign-combat high.

So, really, it took the Republicans no time at all to be pronouncing his entire presidency a dismal failure--even before that first, arbitrary 100-day deadline had passed.

In that time, Obama signed a cascade of landmark legislation dealing with every kind of issue you can name, but they passed in a blur with little notice before the next big controversy.

Some say he has brought this on himself by insisting on time constraints for so many of the staggering problems facing this nation.

I mean, geez, it's so cruel and unusual, the punishment visited on congress--why, under Bush, they only had to work three-day weeks.  NOW they've actually got to show up some weekends!  The horror!  The horror!

So he gets criticized for moving too slowly on some issues, too quickly on some, for doing too much and not doing enough, for being too weak and too strong on the same issues, and time and again, I read these snide op-eds or blogposts about how he's already blown it.

They're even claiming that the poor hapless voters who put their trust in this man are somehow already suffering from "buyer's remorse."

(Oh yeah.  IF ONLY we'd put John McCain and Sarah Palin in office instead!  I hear that all the time, don't you?)

It has been said that Obama plays chess while the rest of us play checkers; this is true, but inadequate to explain his methods completely.  There are two articles I've seen today that provide a whole new perspective on Obama's method of governing.

One really strikes a nerve on how Obama represents a next-generation way of looking at things.  (Not for nothing that whenever he gives a speech in a foreign country, he bypasses the rulers in the audience and speaks directly to the nation's young people.)

It's by Matt Bai, who has done several major pieces on Obama for the New York Times Magazine, and it's called "The Shuffle President."

In it, Bai examines what he calls the typical "dramatic narrative" of any incoming president, one in which the new guy comes in with a new agenda, and proceeds to tackle his biggest, signature issue first, which he (or someday, she) concentrates the majority of their "political capital" on one major legacy, for better or for worse.  For Bush, it was tax cuts.  For Clinton, it was health care.  That kind of thing.  Those issues define a president, and conventional wisdom is that if they fail in that first big thing, then the rest of their presidency will be a wash.  (I could argue that Clinton's presidency accomplished a great deal, but that's another post.)

Obama has, of course, done no such thing.  He's fought for climate change legislation, health care, finance regulations, public stimulus plans, ending one war and redesigning another, and so on.  All of which has brought on a firestorm of criticism for doing too much, too fast.

Bai says such an outlook may be outdated:

Some of this itinerancy must be attributed to the sheer scope of the wreckage Obama inherited. When you've got failing banks and corporate giants, two ongoing wars, melting icecaps and mountainous health care costs, it's hard to see what gets pushed to the margins. It's also true, though, that Obama's style reflects, whether he means it to or not, a cultural shift on the importance of narrative. Americans acclimated to clicking around hundreds of cable channels or Web pages experience the world less chronologically than their parents did. The most popular books now -- business guides like "Good to Great" or social explorations like "The Tipping Point" -- allow the casual reader to absorb their insights in random order or while skimming whole chapters.

Once we listened to cohesive albums like, say, Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited," which kicked off with the snare hit of "Like a Rolling Stone," almost like a starter pistol, and worked its way toward the melancholy postscript of "Desolation Row." Now your iPod might jump mindlessly from "Desolation Row" to "Tombstone Blues," or from Dylan to Rihanna. The shrink-wrapped record has given way to the downloaded single. Wasn't this one reason for all the tributes to Michael Jackson? It's not that "Thriller" was really as singularly awesome as so many of us thought it was in high school. It's more that we know there may never be an album that epic again.

Obama is the nation's first shuffle president. He's telling lots of stories at once, and in no particular order. His agenda is fully downloadable. If what you care most about is health care, then you can jump right to that. If global warming gets you going, then click over there. It's not especially realistic to imagine that politics could cling to a linear way of rendering stories while the rest of American culture adapts to a more customized form of consumption. Obama's ethos may disconcert the older guard in Washington, but it's probably comforting to a lot of younger voters who could never be expected to listen to successive tracks, in the same order, over and over again.

Bai acknowledges the risks in  this approach--and poll ups-and-downs reflect that.  Some Americans, and their elected representatives, struggle to keep up--as does an exhausted White House staff.  And some accomplishments, like the landmark Lilly Ledbetter Act, pretty much get quickly covered up with the next bill that gets signed or speech given.

But there may be more of a method to Obama's attention-deficit madness than most people grasp.  E.J. Dionne cut through the clutter pretty decisively in this piece in the Washington Post, "Why Obama Likes His Odds."

Again, this is a generational thing--not in terms of years, but in terms of congress, literally:

It was not the soaring rhetoric that is Barack Obama's signature, but he recently offered the sound bite that may define his presidency: "Don't bet against us."

There are reasons to believe that his confident words -- they were about health-care reform but have broader application -- were not the bombast of a bluffer exaggerating the strength of his hand. They reflect the high cards that Obama holds and has only now started to play.

Of course, no one ever thought passing a health-care bill would be easy, and the effort hit some bumps last week over costs and how to cover them.

But Obama doesn't quite see things the way his more nervous Democratic allies do because he missed the years in Washington during which his party was beaten down. Many Democrats had their perceptions of political reality shaped by the failure of Bill Clinton's health proposal, the 1994 Republican revolution and the GOP's triumphalism during President Bush's first term.

That world, however, turned upside down in 2005 -- the year Obama arrived in Washington. Bush's power dissolved in the failure of his Social Security privatization proposal, the Hurricane Katrina backlash and rising disillusionment with the Iraq war. By the end of 2006, less than two years after Obama's arrival, Democrats had seized control of both houses of Congress.

The paradox is that Obama's limited experience under Republican sway makes him more comfortable than many of his allies are with wielding the power that comes from large Democratic majorities.

And it's real power.

Dionne makes an excellent point in his piece, that Democrats were pretty much battered and bruised under 12 years of Republican abuse.  When you have a respected Democratic congressman who left two legs and an arm in the jungles of Vietnam and ran the Veteran's Administration under President Jimmy Carter--Max Cleland--get attacked in political ads for not being patriotic enough, and DEFEATED because of it, then you have only a HINT of the kind of battering Democrats in congress were accustomed to when they first tentatively took over in 2006.

Some of them have not held positions of power for many years, and some of them never have.  Some are still intimidated by right-wingers who once pummeled them in the polls.

"The only things fellow Democrats...have to fear are the fears and insecurities bred into them when they were a battered minority," writes Dionne.  "Obama is free of those doubts because he never knew them."

There are other ways Obama is often underestimated.  The fact that he is willing to listen to all points of view--even encourages this--is often mistaken as a sign of some kind of weakness, as if he has no core values of his own and must try on others to see if they fit.

There is no weakness in considering all points of view, adopting those that are the most pragmatic and workable, and discarding those that are not.  But in the end, it is one man who makes the decisions, and it's a mistake to think that he somehow lacks the strength of character to stand by those decisions.

Much has been made of how the Obama administration studied the Clinton health-care plan and analyzed what went wrong in implementing it, but Clinton's is not the only presidency Obama has looked at.  In a piece in the Washington Post, Ceci Connolly examines how the Obama administration actually STUDIED LBJ's shepherding of Medicare through congress in 1965.

Most people wouldn't see much similarity between the Ivy League-educated, urbane, soft-spoken Obama and the crude, loudmouth, ornery Texan--but actually, there are similarities.  Both came out of the U.S. Senate and both understood how congress worked, and how to "work" congress to get things done. 

Since getting back from his overseas trip, Obama has put on a full-court press behind and in front of the scenes, inviting scores of congresspeople and senators to the White House for arm-twisting sessions, giving speeches and press conferences and YouTube addresses and, as he proved today, moving swiftly to capitalize on mistakes made by the opposition.

When South Carolina's dimwitted senator, Jim DeMint, made the mistake of chortling on-mic that if the Republicans could "shut down" Obama on health care, it would be his "Waterloo" and would "break him," Obama was quick to respond in a rapid-fire soundbite, that health care was not about HIM, not about politics, but that it was "breaking American families." 

Look at headlines on blogposts or op-eds, and already they're talking about how Obama is "struggling," how this is make-or-break time, how the plan is "unraveling" and how this titanic battle could bring down the ship of state.

It makes good drama.  Makes a good story.  I used to tell good stories for a living.  I understand the power of sustaining suspense, of keeping the reader breathlessly turning pages until the big climax.

We are a nation who loves our heroic narratives and our high drama, whether it be so-called "reality TV" or sports or the latest political contest.  We like competition and suspense.  We like to see the good guy win and the bad guy stomped.

And in recent years, we like to express our opinions, loudly and often.  That's fine.  It's democracy as it was meant to be.

But none of that, ultimately, has a whole helluva lot to do with President Obama and how he governs.  Like most pragmatists, he understands that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and that in any compromise, everybody is going to be a little bit disappointed.  The more set in your views, the more disappointed you will be.

But he didn't run for president so that he could spend the next four years running for president, as Bush did, and four years after that trying to lock in Republican power in all three branches of government.

He ran to govern.

Governing is tense and messy but good governing gets results.  Those who underestimate Barack Obama do so because they are writing a dramatic narrative in their heads that he does not fit, and so they dismiss him.

But Barack Obama has thrown out that old construct and shuffled the entire medium, hurling it into a fresh, new, 21st century story, a story in which all the senses are engaged at all times, the action is fast, the results, unexpected. 

In that story, history is respected, but not relived.

It's kind of like the difference between, say, an old Vaudeville variety show...and Cirque de Soleil.

Groundbreakers, trendsetters, and visionaries are always underestimated when they first burst onto the scene, whether it be in science, the arts, or politics.  Throughout history, such men and women have even been imprisoned or put to death because they and their way of looking at the world are so different from most.

This is because people fear change, even when the old way made them miserable.  Most of the rage we observe nowadays on blogs and talk shows and so on are simply a mask to cover fear.  

There is a lot in the world today that we fear, and a great deal of expectation we've put on the shoulders of one skinny guy.  It's easy to think it's just too tough for ANYONE to solve and that, ultimately, all is lost, that any time he makes a mistep, he's about to be hurled into the abyss, and along with him, our hopes and dreams.

We underestimate him and his team, though, at our own peril.  He's proved that time and again.  Those who do underestimate Obama often compare him to other presidents, in other times, at other points in history.

It might be smarter to compare him to HIMSELF.  Where he's been.  How far he's come.  What he's accomplished so far.  What he's working to accomplish in the future.

And how those same people sneered at him when he first ran for president.

Back when I was barely a teen and the Beatles burst onto the scene, I would spend every dime I could earn babysitting for 50 cents an hour on Beatles records and Beatle's memorabilia.

After about six months of this, my mother put her foot down and forbade me to buy anything else Beatles-related.  Not records.  Not magazines.  Nothin'.  Not even with my own money that I had earned babysitting in the neighborhood.

Her reasoning?

"They're just a fad," she declared.  "A silly fad.  Six months from now they'll be gone and somebody else will take their place.  You are not wasting another dime of your money on those stupid Beatles."

Now, last week, my husband and daughter and I, on a company trip to Las Vegas, took in the unimaginably wonderful Cirque de Soleil show, LOVE, based on the Beatles, their history, their time, and their music.  It was two hours of a fabulous phastasmagoria of color and light and sound and that glorious music.  The specially-built ampitheater was sold out, on a weeknight, and it's been, what?  Several years now, since the show opened.

I'm not very good at arithmetic, but I'd say it's been about 45 years since my mother pronounced the Beatles "a fad."

Nope, I wouldn't bet against Obama, either.

For some time now, I've been studying the war in Afghanistan, most intently during the months leading up to President Obama's November win, and since that time.  I haven't written about Afghanistan yet, but I've been thinking about it a great deal, most especially because members of my family will most likely be called upon to fight there. 

(Two have already been, once each.  One is now retired Army Special Forces and the other is active-duty SF.  Another nephew is also active-duty army who did a long dangerous hitch in Iraq and will most likely wind up doing at least one in Afghanistan.  My son and another nephew are still in their Ready Reserve status and could be called up at any time and deployed there.) 

Since fresh new troops have been sent in recent weeks, culminating in a major push in the Helmand River Valley by the Marines that began yesterday, I thought it was a good time to share my perspective, especially since, as a Marine mom whose son did two combat deployments to Iraq and whose nephews did five more, I opposed that war, even back in the days when it was a mere glimmer in the mad eyes of Bush and his oilman armchair warrior cronies.

There are many good peace activists who are absolutely opposed to any troop buildup in Afghanistan for any reason whatsoever, and who believe, categorically, that we should pull everybody out RIGHT NOW, as we appear to be doing in Iraq.  (Or will have done, by 2012.)

They believe the war is unwinnable and that sending more troops signifies that this is "another Vietnam," as I've seen some call it, or "another Russian-type situation" as have others.

I disagree.

In order to explain why, I'm going to provide as many links as I can that will divide up this piece into several sections: I. Bush's Afghanistan  II.  Obama's Promises  III.  The New Generals' New Strategy and IV.  Obama's Afghanistan.

(Note:  It will probably be the length of a magazine article by the time I'm done, so if you're in a rush right now, you might bookmark this or otherwise return to it when you have a little time and want to read it without skimming through in a hurry.)

 

I.  Bush's Afghanistan

Everybody knows that Afghanistan was Bush's Forgotten War before they'd even caught Bin Laden.  (Oh yeah.  They still haven't caught him.)  Donald Rumsfeld was famous for whining that "there aren't any good targets" to bomb in Afghanistan, for one thing, and for another, the real war they always wanted to fight, since 1991 in fact, was Iraq.

Yes, our forces, helped by the Brits and others, kicked al Qaeda butt and installed their own guy in Kabul, and I don't take anything away from the bravery of our troops who were the point of the spear in those battles.  There is no such thing as an "easy war."  Getting shot at is getting shot at, and there's nothing easy about it unless you're using paint guns, or like maybe Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and All Their Enablers, your feverish imaginations.

But by 2002, Bush and Co. were already training their short attention spans on Iraq, and in no time at all, they had drained troops, materiel, helicopters, planes, artillery--everything the guys needed to root out al Qaeda and the Taliban and secure that population, thus protecting us from their unholy alliance--(you know, the one that brought us 9/11 in the first place), out of Afghanistan and into Iraq, where it stayed for the next seven years.

You can't imagine how tough it was on those who were left to fight this war with NOTHING.  Stuck in miserable little shanty-outposts on isolated mountain peaks; no showers, no phones, virtually no air support and scanty artillery--for months, under fire daily, daily, daily; it's been HELL.

Because so much of our own attention was preoccupied with that illegal, bloody, endless war in Iraq, we failed to take into account just what life was like for the troops who DID deploy to Afghanistan.  (And understand, many of them had already done one or more deployments to Iraq before they even showed up in those remote mountain outposts.)

The New York Times has done an extraordinary job of NOT forgetting Afghanistan, and its intrepid little cadre of war reporters and their cameramen/women have traipsed into some of the worst areas of fighting to chronicle for us what it has been like, sometimes providing riveting slideshows and audio shows of firefights.

Also to be commended is Sebastian Junger (who wrote The Perfect Storm), and who has made numerous journeys deep into the bowels of the beast for Vanity Fair and Outdoor magazines, with his photographer, Tim Hetherington, for which they have won numerous prestigious journalism and news-photography awards.

And I would be remiss if I neglected to mention Richard Engel from NBC news, whose work has been unparallelled.

Here are some of the best articles and photo essays I've found:

*"G.I.'s in Remote Post have Weary Jobs, Drawing Fire," C.J. Chivers

*"Turning Tables, U.S. Troops Ambush Taliban With Swift and Lethal Results," C.J. Chivers

*"Pinned Down, a Sprint to Escape Taliban Zone," C.J. Chivers

"In Bleak Afghan Outpost, Troops Slog On," C.J. Chivers

*"Return to the Valley of Death," Sebastian Junger 

(For several links to Tim Hetherington's stunning photo essays, look here.)

One of the best pieces appeared in New York Times Magazine ("A Change in MIssion" by Kristen Henderson) just a couple weeks ago, but I will link to that in a moment because it deals with how the war is beginning to change with a new commander-in-chief, and the challenges the junior officers in the field (lieutenants and captains) are facing, implementing those changes.

Right now, we're talking about Bush's War.

This war, for the men and women who have been ABANDONED for the past seven years while they slogged on and slogged on, has been impossible to fight.  They haven't had vehicles, or helicopters, or enough troops or artillery, or simple things like a place to eat.  They haven't had decent supplies of ANYTHING, and for the men (combat units are still all-male) stranded on these remote outposts, the firefights with Taliban number in the hundreds. 

One unit I read about has been in place for about six months and have so far dealt with FIVE HUNDRED firefights.

You do the math.

It has been piss-poor, the way these brave men have been treated.  Rotten.  Miserable.  SHAMEFUL.

And the U.S. military is not to be blamed for it, because they've done the best they can with this groaning responsibility thrust upon them by Bush and Co--to fight two wars.  There was once an old sit-com that came out during the Carter years called, "Carter Country," which featured a (very) small-town Southern sheriff's department.  They had this fat, worthless little mayor who was forever getting the little town into some kind of dire straits and then turning to the sheriff or his longsuffering aide and waving his fingers, blithely grinning and saying, "Handle it, handle it!"

This is what the military's boss did to them for eight outrageous years.  Bogged them down in intractible wars, then figuratively grinned and said, "Handle it, handle it!"

(While all the time, it must be remembered, boasting of maybe bombing Iran or North Korea.)

And while fighting the Forgotten War, troops also had to deal with regular guerilla-war problems:

*"In Afghanistan, Terrain Rivals Taliban as Enemy," Candace Rondeaux

*"Afghan Officials Aided in Attack on U.S. Soldiers," Eric Schmidt; (in which nine American troops were killed and 27 were injured, just two weeks before going home following a 15-month deployment)

*"Afghan Firefight Shows Challenge for US Troops," Chris Brummitt, writing for the AP

Every time I would read one of these articles, I would get so angry I would shake from head to foot.  Nobody loved using the troops as a photo-op backdrop or weepy speech-stuffer better than George W. Bush. 

And nobody--EVER--abused our troops worse.

 

II.  Obama's Promises

Understand that, whenever I would read about the godawful situation in Afghanistan, I would read a wish-list of what would be needed to fix the situation, from troops on the ground, from the generals, from aide workers, from diplomats, from Aghans themselves.  And nearly always, they would say, "But that will probably never happen."

Then Obama was elected president.

One of the first things he did was order up a full review of what would be needed from General Petraeus, and he gave the general two months to come up with it.  Petraeus is a highly-educated man who has surrounded himself with military advisors who, like himself, have doctorates or otherwise a scholarly background.  He combines this perspective with on-the-ground savvy when he conducts these studies.

And the plan his task force came up with was just exactly what all those people had been saying would be needed.

The only difference is that THIS time, someone was listening.

And what many of the doubters don't seem to realize is that increasing the numbers of troops in-country is only PART of that strategy.  It's not like Vietnam, when we simply escalated and escalated and escalated our occupying forces, nor is it like the Soviet Union, who endeavored to fight a conventional war when it sent its troops into Afghanistan.

This is different.

Two of the best essays I've found that explain the difference, in proper historial context, with the new strategy are:

*"Graveyard Myths," Peter Bergen

*"A Manhunt or a Vital War?" Robert D. Kaplan

What sets Obama's strategy apart from Bush's is that, first of all, there IS a strategy.

During the worst of the Forgotten-War days, commanders on the ground complained that there was, quite simply, NO STRATEGY for dealing with Afghanistan. 

This comes as no surprise to those of us who watched Iraq implode under the no-strategy Bush Rule there, but in the case of Afghanistan, when it is so desperately important that we not allow al Qaeda to resettle into their comfy little Taliban homes and plot anew, unbothered, to kill Americans--this was just unforgivable, and frustrating beyond belief for the military that was tasked with the no-strategy war.

Obama's careful, considered approach has been dramatically different because there IS a strategy and there IS an exit plan.  No, you can't put a timeframe on it, not yet.  But it will begin to take shape over the course of the next year.

The strategy includes, yes, more troops in the short-term.  This is necessary not just to relieve the beleagured mountain-guys who've been stuck in Nowhereland for years now, but to throw out the Taliban in areas where it's been operating with impunity, areas such as the rich Helmand River Valley area, where poppy-farming supports the opium trade that keeps al Qaeda in operation.

We just did not have enough troops to spread around that enormous country, at least, not in force, and not in a way that they could STAY once they cleared out an area.  The local populations do not like the Taliban, by and large, but they fear them greatly, and with good reason.  They need protection, and we have not been able to provide it for them.

But beyond that, Obama's plan calls on a gigantic influx of civilians to help build this new Afghanistan--not just billions to bury in no-bid contract building projects, but actual civil servants to help teach Afghans how to take care of themselves.

For two quick, one-page assessments of this strategy, here are editorials from the New York Times and the Washington Post on this subject that appeared in March--before Pakistan had even begun clamping down on ITS side of the border, affectively creating a vise to trap terrorists:

*"The Price of Realism," Washington Post

*"The Remembered War," New York Times

I'm going to get into more detail about the new strategy in part IV, but for now, I want to draw attention to the new guys who are going to be called upon to implement the new strategy:

 

III.  The New Generals' New Strategy

There was, in the beginning, some worry about Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the new U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, who comes from a top-secret Special Forces background and whose responsibilities have been, to date, to track down terrorists and kill them.  So there was some concern that he wouldn't "get" Obama's so-called "soft power" approach.

And yes, there are, historically, some generals like, say, Patton, who are bad-ass bastards all the way through, my-way-or-the-highway types to whom the troops are pretty much chess pieces to be shoved around on a board, damn the casualties.

Then there are the Dwight D. Eisenhowers, the generals who learn as they go and adjust their approaches accordingly, to whom each and every one of those troops is a flesh-and-blood human being and somebody's son or daughter.

Which type of general do you think a man like Barack Obama would favor?

This reminds me of a funny story.  (Yes, really.)  It's been my observation that some people are in awe of generals, maybe a little bit afraid of them.  They seem to think that becoming a general is some sort of superhuman accomplishment, reserved only for the choicest among us.

Now, most of you know I've got a brother-in-law who retired at the rank of Brigadier General of the U.S. Army Special Forces.  Both his sons are active-duty army and both are captains now with their own company commands.

His sister, my sister-in-law, Kay, is the mother of a Marine who served three combat deployments to Iraq as an enlisted man.  Even though he is no longer active-duty, she still volunteers every Sunday afternoon of her life with the USO out at DFW airport.  One of the things they do is see off deploying troops, providing Care packages for them with things like phone cards and edible goodies.

One time, the deploying troops were accompanied by a general who was also deploying.

Kay asked the other volunteers if anybody had given the general a Care package.

They looked at her as if she'd suddenly sprouted horns and said, "Well, NO.  He's...he's a GENERAL."

Cocking her head, she said, "So what?  He's just somebody's dumb old big brother."

With that, she marched up to the general and asked if he'd like a Care package and if there was anything she could do for him.

Delighted with the package, he thanked her and said, "Ma'am, as long as I'm here, my troops will think I'm trying to keep an eye on them.  They've got enough on their minds as it is, and I don't want them to be intimidated by my presence.  If you had just someplace I could wait in private, I'd appreciate it."

She found him an empty office, and he gratefully waited for the plane to arrive.

It's easy, when surrounded by Brass, to get "intimidated" and forget that, really, these guys are just somebody's dumb old big brothers.

Bush was always a little bit in awe of his generals.

And while Obama has the deep respect that their rank and experience affords them, he does not lose sight of what he wants to accomplish and how he wants things to change in Afghanistan.  There is no way he'd hand it over to somebody like, say, Patton, when what he really needs is an Eisenhower.  (Yeah, that's a very broad metaphor.  Please don't provide a lengthy history lesson on the two generals in the comment section, 'kay?  Let's stick to this war for now.)

A couple of quotes given by Gen. McChrystal to the Wall Street Journal are instructive in that vein, I think, in how he has changed his view of warfare to suit the new circumstance:

 

After watching the U.S. try and fail for years to put down insurgencies in both countries, Gen. McChrystal said he believes that to win in Afghanistan, "You're going to have to convince people, not kill them.

"Since 9/11, I have watched as America tried to first put out this fire with a hammer, and it doesn't work," he said last week at his home at Fort McNair in Washington. "Decapitation strategies don't work."

 

Soundbite-quotes make good copy, but McChrystal is backing up his words with his actions, according to this piece in the New York Times:

 

The new American commander in Afghanistan has been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans, as he moves to carry out an ambitious new strategy that envisions stepped-up attacks on Taliban fighters and narcotics networks.

The extraordinary leeway granted the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, underscores a view within the administration that the war in Afghanistan has for too long been given low priority and needs to be the focus of a sustained, high-level effort.

General McChrystal is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside Special Operations, but reflects an approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

The new general's first task will be to report back, in 60 days from now, to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, an assessment of his mission and plans for implementing President Obama's new strategy.

So...Just what IS that strategy:

 

IV.  Obama's Afghanistan

The first thing you have to understand about Obama's Afghanistan is that it is not just the MILITARY'S Afghanistan--this is a civilian undertaking, every bit as much.

And they are heading over to the country right along with the military.  According to the Washington Post:

 

A civilian "surge" of hundreds of additional U.S. officials in Afghanistan would accompany the already approved increase in U.S. troop levels there under a new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy being completed at the White House, according to administration officials...

Officials said the proposed strategy includes a more narrowly focused concentration on security, governance and local development in Afghanistan, with continued emphasis on rule-of-law issues and combating the narcotics trade. U.S. and British troops in the southern part of the country will attempt to oust entrenched Taliban forces, with an influx of reinforcements enabling them to retain control -- and help protect enhanced civilian operations -- until greatly expanded and sufficiently trained Afghan army and police forces are able to take their place.

 

It's not just us sending more folks from the State Dept., either:

 

In addition to increasing its own civilian component, the administration seeks better coordination among the many other governments and international and nongovernmental agencies operating in Afghanistan, often with different rules and objectives. The strategy proposals include a strengthening of the United Nations as a clearinghouse and overall coordinator of nonmilitary efforts, including the appointment of veteran U.S. diplomat Peter W. Galbraith as deputy to Norwegian Kai Eide, the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan.

"This is a big deal," said a senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity before the appointment is announced. "The Bush administration undermined and ignored the U.N., and we minimized our influence. But imagine, with all the money we pay and American troops on the line, not to have a senior person" at the top level of the U.N. effort. A U.N. official said Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will announce Galbraith's appointment in "a matter of days."

 

In another piece, also by Karen De Young of the Post, the State Dept. has already begun to recruit diplomats from among its ranks for the new postings:

 

The State Department will significantly expand its presence in regional capitals in western and northern Afghanistan in coming months, part of the Obama administration's plans for a "surge" in civilians going to the country.

"As part of our expanding efforts in Afghanistan," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a cable sent Saturday to all Foreign Service officers, "the Department intends to create 14 additional FS positions in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif."

The cable called the jobs "priority" assignments and "new opportunities" for diplomats about to bid on new postings for later this year.

 

Even Bob Woodward, no doubt working on another war book, seems to get the message, in a lengthy piece for the Post this past weekend:

 

National security adviser James L. Jones told U.S. military commanders here last week that the Obama administration wants to hold troop levels here flat for now, and focus instead on carrying out the previously approved strategy of increased economic development, improved governance and participation by the Afghan military and civilians in the conflict.

The message seems designed to cap expectations that more troops might be coming, though the administration has not ruled out additional deployments in the future. Jones was carrying out directions from President Obama, who said recently, "My strong view is that we are not going to succeed simply by piling on more and more troops."

"This will not be won by the military alone," Jones said in an interview during his trip. "We tried that for six years." He also said: "The piece of the strategy that has to work in the next year is economic development. If that is not done right, there are not enough troops in the world to succeed."

 

But what ABOUT the military?  Do THEY get it?  What about the 4,000 Marines that poured into the Helmand River Valley yesterday and today?  Did anyone send THEM the memo?

Apparently, yes.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes for the Post:

 

State has promised to have a dozen more diplomats and reconstruction experts working with the Marines, but only by the end of the summer.

To compensate in the interim, the Marines are deploying what officers here say is the largest-ever military civilian-affairs contingent attached to a combat brigade -- about 50 Marines, mostly reservists, with experience in local government, business management and law enforcement. Instead of flooding the area of operations with cash, as some units did in Iraq, the Marine civil affairs commander, Lt. Col. Curtis Lee, said he intends to focus his resources on improving local government.

Once basic governance structures are restored, civilian reconstruction personnel plan to focus on economic development programs, including programs to help Afghans grow legal crops in the area. Senior Obama administration officials say creating jobs and improving the livelihoods of rural Afghans is the key to defeating the Taliban, which has been able to recruit fighters for as little as $5 a day in Helmand.

In meetings with his commanders at forward operating bases over the past three days, Nicholson acknowledged that focusing on governance and population security does not come as naturally to Marines as conducting offensive operations, but he told them it is essential that they focus on "reining in the pit bulls."

"We're not going to measure your success by the number of times your ammunition is resupplied. . . . Our success in this environment will be very much predicated on restraint," he told a group of officers from the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines on Sunday. "You're going to drink lots of tea. You're going to eat lots of goat. Get to know the people. That's the reason why we're here."

 

Drinking tea and eating goat may not seem like what Marines signed up for, but you would be surprised.  They're there to protect the people, and if this is the best way to go about it, then so be it.

And for those who worry about the fact that Obama has sent more troops and fear he may send more, you need to realize that he's going about this with great care and thought.  Richard A. Oppel, Jr. wrote this for the Times:

 

The 21,000 additional American troops that Mr. Obama authorized after taking office in January almost precisely matches the original number of additional troops that President George W. Bush sent to Iraq two years ago. It will bring the overall American deployment in Afghanistan to more than 60,000 troops. But Mr. Obama avoided calling it a surge and resisted sending the full reinforcements initially sought by military commanders.

Instead, Mr. Obama chose to re-evaluate troop levels over the next year, officials said. The Obama administration has said that the additional American commitment has three main strategies for denying havens for the Taliban and Al Qaeda: training Afghan security forces, supporting the weak central Afghan government in Kabul and securing the population.

 

Even the manner in which the military is deploying is being adjusted to Obama's strategy.  Consider this from the Post on how the 82nd Airborne is reconfiguring its troops:

 

The extra 4,000 U.S. troops, expected to deploy in early fall, are to fill that gap. In a sign of the new importance the administration is placing on the mission, a brigade of the Army's vaunted 82nd Airborne Division is being broken up into 10-to-14-member advisory teams, a Pentagon official said. Until now, the military has relied heavily on inexperienced National Guardsmen to fill out the teams.

"The change couldn't be more dramatic," said retired Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan defense think tank. "The 82nd Airborne Division is the nation's shock force."

"We want to move as aggressively and as quickly as possible to build up the Afghan national army," one administration official said. "It's much cheaper in the long run to train Afghans to fight" than to send U.S. forces "halfway around the world."

 

And finally, what do all these policy changes mean to the men and women on the ground who are charged with implementing them?

I'm not talking about the generals.  I'm talking about the enlisted men and women, the first and second lieutenant platoon leaders, the captain and major company commanders--these are the TRUE tip of the spear, and if THEY don't get it, NOBODY does.

This is what makes Kristen Henderson's article, "A Change in Mission," which appeared in the New York Times Magazine on June 21, so fascinating to me.

Henderson is married to a Navy chaplain.  Navy chaplains do not always spend their time in which they are deployed on-board gigantic ships.  They also deploy with combat Marines and minister to those guys right in the thick of things.  Henderson is, herself, no slouch as a war correspondent--I suspect that the Marines cooperate far more with a female war correspondent if she's married to a Navy chaplain who has, himself, deployed.  They realize that she speaks their language and understands their world better than most.

For this piece, she was front and center on one of the many isolated outposts that our soldiers and Marines have defended so bravely and with so little support for so many years. 

Her writing makes you feel the sweat and the fear.

First Lieutenant Arthur Karell, who she profiles in the piece, is Harvard-educated and was Wall Street-employed before he enlisted in the Marines.  During his deployment, he has seen a great deal of combat under hardscrabble conditions, but it doesn't stop there.  He also spends much of his time sitting in dirt floors with villagers, drinking sweet tea and talking to them about what they need, what they expect, what are their complaints, and how he can help.

One of his biggest frustrations was that, once they pulled out and headed for home, all their hard work in securing the area would be lost--which is why he was elated when, after Obama was elected, his unit got the news that reinforcements would be replacing them, this time with the helicopters as well as civilian support that they had not had during his time in Afghanistan.

He told Henderson that, just seeing what one platoon could accomplish all by itself, he had great hope that with the new strategy, some real change might take place in that country.

Which is one of many reasons that, even though his old Wall Street firm thew him a party when his enlistment ended and offered him his old job back--he chose to re-enlist instead.

This is a man who, only a year before, had ordered his men to fix bayonets on their rifles--because they were expecting the combat to be that close, deadly, and terrifying.

If a young man like that--only 26 years old--can have that kind of hope, that kind of optimism in the fact of President Obama's new strategy for Afghanistan, then I don't hardly see how the rest of us can fail him.

Let's just give this thing a chance to work.  Those guys who've been stranded forgotten on top of remote mountaintop outposts for eight years now deserve at least that much.

If it fails, it fails.

But it is worth at least a chance.

It's all our guys ever asked of us, and it's the least we owe them, and the least we owe the people of Afghanistan.

 

"She really was someone who could look fear in the face and conquer it...When all of us reflect on our own lives, the emotion which controls us so greatly is fear.  I think that was Farrah's message to us in the way she conducted her own journey, is:

"Be as fearless as you can be.  Don't be intimidated by fear.  Keep marching forward.  Do what you think is right.  Fight for what you want to fight for, whether you are losing the battle or not."  (emphasis mine)

--Dr. Lawrence Piro, President, Angeles Clinic and Research Institute, personal physician to Farrah, in an interview with Barbara Walters for ABC.

 

When I remember Farrah Fawcett, I don't think of her dazzling smile or the famous poster in the red bathing suit.  I don't even think of her tabloid personal life--her romantic tumult, her drug-addicted son--I think of her talent, and her guts, and I'm not just talking about the three years she spent battling incurable cancer.

In order to truly understand Farrah's courage, you have to take her life in context of growing up in the 50's and coming of age in the '60's and '70's, especially if you were a pretty girl from the South. 

Pretty girls coming of age in those days were taught to be pleasers.  They were taught to always smile, no matter what, to defer to men in every way, to mask their own intelligence if it meant that other people (read, men) would be threatened by that, and that the only ambition suitable for the time was to find a good husband to take care of you, settle down, and care for him and your houseful of children for the rest of your life. 

If, like Farrah, you were truly beautiful, you were supposed to parlay that beauty into the position it afforded: choice.  By that I mean, you were supposed to choose the man with the most earning potential, the most political power, the most POTENTIAL.  (He, in turn, was to be commended for winning the hand of the prettiest girl in the room.)

You weren't supposed to have any potential of your own, beyond being pretty and pleasing for him.

After a beautiful girl got married, she was supposed to "represent" her husband by how she conducted herself, how she helped propel his career, how she kept her home and raised her children.  If she did everything right, that meant a fine home in the best neighborhood, kids who qualified for the best schools, and so on.

Even when she gave birth, she was not identified in the paper by her own name, but by her husband's.  In fact, for her entire life, her identity was supposed to be a reflection of her husband's, and later, her children's.

It wasn't just pretty girls from the South who rebelled against this corset of an existence.

(Full disclosure: My despairing mother enrolled me in "Charm School" when I was 12, in hopes I would learn how to do things like walk straight with a book on my head, sit properly like a "lady," with my hands lying passively in my lap and my ankles crossed demurely, and deal with any disaster with a smile.  So, in the class, I kept up a steady stream of sarcastic wisecracks which, ultimately, got me kicked out, much to my mom's chagrin.) 

Anyway, as everyone knows, Boomer women rebelled big-time in the '60's and 70's, but it took a couple of decades for their battles to make the kinds of changes that people who were born in the '70's now take for granted.

So, at the time, American culture was still dominated by male-centric themes.  (In that respect, it still is in many ways.  Check out the latest blockbuster movies and see how many have female leads, or females in any serious capacity beyond being The Girlfriend or The Tortured Victim Awaiting Rescue.)

No one could capitalize on the male-dominated themes better than Aaron Spelling, and when he created "Charlie's Angels" and cast three hot, incredibly sexy unknowns in the lead roles, he created a phenomenon that comes along once a decade, if that.

Those of us who were budding feminists enjoyed the program simply because it showed women being brave and intrepid and solving the crime and dodging danger and saving victims--even if they did it in bikinis.  Our husbands and boyfriends enjoyed it for the obvious reasons.

And nobody was a bigger hit than Farrah.  She was a terrible actress at that time, but there was something about her, a quality that went beyond sexiness to seduce us all.  Part of it was the dazzling smile, of course, but it was more than that.  She was fun.  She was playful.  She didn't take the part seriously because she knew nobody else did, so in a way, she was winking and nudging her audience as if to say, "It's okay.  I get the joke, too."

We all fell in love--by the bazillions--so when, after only one season on the program, she suddenly quit the show, it caused a cultural tsunami that makes Jon and Kate's divorce seem like child's play.

You have to understand how hard that was for her.  Aaron Spelling was the most powerful man in Hollywood at the time and had limitless legal options to destroy her, which is what he tried to do.  She was still under contract, and there were suits and countersuits that would tie up much of her time and most of her fortune for years.

Not only that, but because she'd signed a contract with the program for several years, then she was not permitted to work in the business for years after that.  Not just because of the obvious reasons, but because Spelling was so powerful that nobody really wanted to cross him.

Farrah Fawcett's decision to leave Charlies Angels was part of a multi-pronged effort to reinvent herself and rechannel her career.  She also fired her agent and her manager, and left her husband, Lee Majors, who was himself a huge TV star at the time.

She could see that if she had stayed with the TV show season after season, she would be branded as the T-and-A girl, the ingenue, the sexpot lead.  And she knew how short the careers are for girls who base their careers on that, and that alone.

That was not what Farrah wanted.  She wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, and she knew that the longer she stayed entangled in the Spelling spiderweb, the less chance she'd have to achieve that goal.

During her time out of the limelight, she studied acting, and she read, and she painted and sculpted, and she tried to get people to see past the hair and the teeth.

In an interview with Barbara Walters in 1980, her famous hair was straight, as if she'd just gotten out of bed and run a brush through it.  She said that her looks were sometimes "a curse," which I'm sure most viewers took as arrogance but was in fact, raw honesty.

When Hollywood failed to give her any leeway, she left for New York, where she got the lead of a small play off-Broadway called "Extremities," which is about a rape victim who, several years later, encounters her rapist--who does not remember her at all--when he shows up at her home in an official capacity as some kind of repairman.  (Been a while since I've seen it.)

She turns the tables on him by using his short memory against him, luring him into a trap she sets for him in which she keeps him imprisoned and proceeds to torture him in revenge.

For the part, Farrah cut off her famous hair in a short shoulder-bob, and delivered the performance of her life; it was searing, raw, almost too painful to watch, and so powerful that it landed her the lead in the TV movie based on the play.

That role relaunched her career and garnered her an Emmy nomination--the first of three. 

After that, she played her most memorable part as a wife who is so horrifically abused by her husband that she sets fire to him in bed.  Based on a true story, in which the woman was not convicted for the crime because the jury was so horrified by the details of her abuse at her husband's hands, changed public discourse on the battered wife and put Farrah on the map as a talent to be reckoned with.

Her next Emmy nomination came for playing the lead role in Ann Rule's "Small Sacrifices," about a woman who killed her three children (actually one survived, but barely), because her boyfriend didn't like kids.

These roles were gritty and tough, and for the better part of a decade, Fawcett held our attention in one TV-movie after another, proving herself time and again, but unfortunately, that's not what interested the tabloids.

Yes, I would like to have seen Farrah be as forceful and tough in her personal life as she was in her career.  She got involved with more than one man who turned out to be abusive.  All I can say is, it takes a long time to throw off that pleaser-trait that's been so closely bred into you throughout your childhood and adolescence, especially where men are concerned.

She did eventually kick them all out, living on her own for years until her longtime-love, Ryan O'Neal was himself diagnosed with lieukemia eight years ago and then her own devastating illness, after which he never left her side.

As Farrah aged, the scripts that were offered her were fewer and further between, (a fate typical of most actresses), leaving her in a virtual career-desert throughout most of her 40's, so in typical Farrah fashion, she threw it all back in their faces by posting for Playboy magazine at 48 and again at 50--the bestselling covers the magazine ever had.

You have to understand something here.  Before Farrah, beautiful actresses did not take parts where they chopped off their trademark hair and allowed the camera to show them ravaged.  It just was not done.

Years later, when Charleze Theron gained weight and butched her way to an Oscar by playing serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, she had Farrah Fawcett to thank for giving her the courage to do it.

And see, before Farrah, women in their late 40's and early 50's wouldn't have been caught DEAD in Playboy magaine or anywhere else that displayed their bodies.

It just was not done.

But Farrah did it.  She lived her life on her own terms--mistakes and all.

The David Letterman show was a disastrous mistake.  Ryan O'Neal, her lover of 30 years, insists that Farrah was not drunk or stoned or on any kind of prescription drugs when she made the appearance as a spaced-out aging beauty queen who could barely hold a thought. 

She told him, he says, that she thought it would be funny.  It was--but at her expense.

A few more years passed, but Farrah refused to go to the elephant burial grounds of all aging ingenues.

She produced, directed, and starred in a show for the Playboy network in which she painted giant murals with her own nude body, covered in paint, while O'Neal sat nearby and watched.

It was outrageous; it was bodacious; it was glorious.

Until that special, most people did not even realize that Farrah Fawcett was a gifted artist in her own right, a sculpter of sweeping sensuality and delicate beauty.

She just kept fighting, you see, long after all the others had given up.

When Fawcett was diagnosed in 2006, at the age of 59, with a very rare form of cancer, she did something that might have struck so many as unexpected but really wasn't if you'd been paying attention to more than just the smile and the body: she picked up a handheld video camera and took it along with her to chemotherapy and doctor's visits, eventually enlisting friends to help.

They told her she was going to die but she was so sure that she could beat it that she thought, this way, she could demystify so much that terrifies the rest of us about cancer, maybe help fellow sufferers by giving them courage and heart for their own battles.

When her magnificent hair began falling out in huge gobs, she filmed it.

When chemo made her vomit, the camera did not turn away and neither did she.

When her hair was gone for good, she showed off her brave bald head and kept on fighting.

And when the doctors told her that the tumors had spread and spread and that, even though she'd been feeling so much better, she was not, in fact, going to beat it, she cried and did not ask the cameras to quit filming.

This was Farrah, the REAL Farrah, the Farrah who'd been there all along for anyone to see who'd been looking beyond the red bathing suit.

(The resulting documentary special, Farrah's Story, is going to be re-aired on NBC tonight, I believe.  You'll have to channel-check because it won't be on any TV guide schedules.) 

Farrah Fawcett was, arguably in her prime, the most beautiful woman in the world.  But her beauty went far beyond the smile and the hair and the body.  It went soul-deep.  She was funny and fiesty and brave and talented and gentle.  She loved her family and friends with ferocity and passion, taking time even in her dying days to hand-write letters of love to each of them in her graceful, flowing script.

We can learn so much more from Farrah than how to fix our hair.

As her grieving doctor so eloquently put it, we can learn to fight for what we want to fight for, whether we are winning the battle or not.

Good night, sweet beautiful Farrah.

And thank you.

It's Father's Day, and for most of us, that means prowling the greeting-card aisles of discount stores, maybe looking for a gift, too, and if we don't live nearby, making sure we call Dad on the day.  If we do live near, we try to visit, or maybe there's a big family to-do involving food and gifts and laughter.

But for a small sliver of our population, Father's Day is the most depressing day of the year.  In the weeks leading up to the day, the people in this group try to avoid the greeting-card section, because they won't be selecting any Father's Day cards this year.  Or next year.

Or ever.

When the slow blue sedan pulls up in front of a house or apartment complex, and a couple of soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors gets out, followed usually by a chaplain or other counselor, the family inside is usually going about their normal day.  Kids might be running through the house or playing in the yard.  A mom or a dad might be just getting out of the car from running errands, or just scraping the car keys off the kitchen table to leave for church, or a ball game, or work.  They might be watching TV or getting ready for dinner.

They are never ready.  No one is ever ready.

My own dad is a retired Marine Corps Master Gunnery Sergeant who requested (more like demanded) to serve in the Vietnam war, even though he was 40 and had five children, including a newborn baby daughter.  He came back whole and hardy, but over the course of his career, one of the jobs he held was as the notification officer.

Sitting in that car in front of the house, knowing that you are about to destroy a whole host of lives, knowing that whoever answers the door is going to scream or burst into tears or yell at you or just stand silently, gripping the doorframe as if it were a life preserver on a huge unforgiving ocean is one of the toughest jobs in the military service.

It never gets any easier, that job.  You never get used to it.

One of my husband's brothers is also retired; he was a Brigadier General in the U.S. Army Special Forces, and over the course of his distinguished career, one of his tasks for a period of time was to attend every funeral of a fallen service member.

This was, of course, before the two wars we have going right now have taken so many thousands of lives that no one man could ever attend all the funerals.

This is a man who served in the Balkans and at the beginning of the Afghanistan war, he deployed there as well, and yet, the father of two sons himself, attending these funerals was one of the most difficult jobs he ever had over his decades in the military.

Now, both of his sons are active-duty.  One has already deployed to Afghanistan and another to Iraq.  Though they both returned from their deployments sound of body and mind, either one of them could be called upon to deploy again, and again, as so many are these days.

And every time you deploy again to a war zone, you are playing Russian Roulette that THIS time, you won't make it back.

At dinner tables all over the country on this Father's Day there are empty chairs that will never again be filled by a father.  (And, we must not forget--mothers as well.)

Many thousands of children have been cheated out of having a Daddy or Mama watch them grow up, because of these wars and the multiple deployments.  They have to endure Father's Days or Mother's Days in silence and loneliness.

And that does not even COUNT the men who, today, must suffer through another Father's Day without their beloved sons or daughters; who must live with the fact that they outlived their own children.

There can be no harsher fate.

When a fallen servicemember is laid to rest under full military honors, a tri-folded flag is presented to the spouse and children, or to the parents or other family member, who are told:

"On behalf of a grateful nation, I present this flag as a token of our appreciation for the faithful and selfless service of your loved one for this country."

"On behalf of a grateful nation."

But I wonder...Just how grateful IS this nation?

Comedian Stephen Colbert's recent week in Iraq brought him the lowest ratings of his program's run, particularly among the coveted 18-34 age group.

Evening news programs ignore either war unless there is some gory B-roll they can air following some exciting battle or other.

When troops come home, when they get out of the service, when they look for jobs, they have a much harder time finding work--their unemployment is more than 11 percent now.  When they do interview for positions, they find indifferent employers who know nothing about the war and care even less.  Sometimes they even encounter hostility, as if every last one of them is a deranged Rambo, looking for a workplace to shoot up.

And when they die, nobody outside their family seems to notice or care.

You don't even see very many yellow ribbon magnets anymore.  At least with those, people could pretend that they really cared about the troops, because hey, they were patriotic, weren't they?

In fact, the entire war, whether it's Afghanistan or Iraq, has become to most people something unreal, like, say, a movie or TV show.

Or video game.

Did you know that the Battle of Fallujah, (given the dramatic military-style name of "Operation Phantom Fury") which cost this country more lives than at any other time during the entire six-year-and-counting war, the definitive battle of the war in which my own son's Marine unit received more awards for bravery and heroism than the entire U.S. military, has been turned into a video game?

According to Newsweek magazine, a video game is in development by a guy named Peter Tampte of Atomic Games, called, "Six Days In Fallujah."

"Tamte is not above triviality," states the article. "A second company he runs, Destineer, makes games with titles like Indy 500 and Fantasy Aquarium. But the 41-year-old executive says he's now attempting something more serious: a documentary-style reconstruction that will be so true to the original battle, gamers will almost feel what it was like to fight in Fallujah in November 2004."

Now, in all fairness to Tampte, it must be stated that he invited a number of Fallujah Battle veterans to help him provide that realism:

"Capt. Read Omohundro, who led a Marine company in Fallujah and lost 13 men there, acts as a kind of quality-control manager for Six Days. "I'll say to them, no, that guy has to be facing the other way. This piece of ammunition doesn't blow up so fast, it only detonates this much. You can't be standing next to it when it goes off or you'll become a casualty." In Atomic's conference room, Omohundro recently described to artists and designers what Fallujah looked like when tanks kicked up dust and debris. "It's not sand like at the beach," he said. "It's that talcum-powder crap. It gets into everything. It just hangs around and you're waiting forever for it to go away."

I do not fault the soldiers and Marines who have helped this man develop his video game.  Just about every young male in existence today loves video games, and gaming provides a welcome escape for the troops who are fighting these wars.  When they come back from missions, many of them play video games to take their minds off the stress of combat.

But with all due respect to Capt. Omohundro and the others who helped Tampte, I believe they were used.  They were thinking in terms of "getting it right," which I completely understand, because if you watch any war movie, say, with most any veteran, they will get immensely frustrated at the mistakes that have been made portraying a war they themselves actually fought in.  And nothing means more to them than seeing a movie like, for instance, Saving Private Ryan, that has taken meticulous detail to get it right.

But for Tampte, let's face it, this wasn't about realism.  It was about making money. And lots of it, apparently, because the project had the backing of $20 million from investors.

While he's busy explaining that the company has been working to develop this game for four years, those of us with emotional investments in that battle are doing the math and realizing that the bodies were barely cold before a video game company was hurrying to capitalize on their sacrifices.

And everything was rocking along great guns...until a source unexpected to Tampte reared its collective head and said, Hold on.

Gold Star families.

Back during World War II, those with loved ones who were serving placed tiny flags in their windows that contained either blue stars, for each family member who was serving, or gold stars, for each family member who had been killed in action.

The Gold Star families who lost loved ones in Fallujah in November of 2004, do not find the deaths of their loved ones entertaining.

"The war is not a game, and neither was the Battle of Fallujah," the group Gold Star Families Speak Out said in a statement. "For Konami and Atomic Games to minimize the reality of an ongoing war and at the same time profit off the deaths of people close to us by making it entertaining is despicable."

"Konami is a Japanese company that distributes and underwrites mostly family-oriented games with names like DanceDanceRevolution and Karaoke Revolution. Two weeks after the publicity event, Konami's Los Angeles-based executives told Tamte in a conference call that the company was ending its involvement with Six Days. Atomic would have to find a new distributor. (Konami would not return newsweek's calls.)

"Tracy Miller, whose son, Cpl. Nicholas Ziolkowski, was killed Nov. 14, was among the Gold Star family members behind the letter. Ziolkowski had been attached to Omohundro's Bravo Company. He and other snipers had taken up position at the Grand Mosque in downtown Fallujah that morning. Dexter Filkins, a New York Timesreporter who embedded with Bravo Company, wrote that Ziolkowski had removed his helmet to get a better look in his scope when a bullet caught him in the head."

The thing is...if, during the course of the game, a "sniper" kills an American troop with a bullet in the head...Is that Cpl. Ziolkowski?

The game's creators insist that the answer would be "no," but how many Americans were killed by sniper fire during that gruesome, horrific battle?  Or small-arms fire, or rockets, or IEDs?

My son was the first one to reach his buddy, Rex, when a sniper shot him in the head during his second deployment.  Do you think HE would enjoy playing a VIDEO GAME depicting such a thing?

Dustin and I discussed this game after we'd each heard about it. 

"It bothers me," he said.  "I tried to tell myself that there are games out there about, say, D-Day, and I never said anything or thought anything about it...but this...It really bothers me."

I said, "Honey, that's because D-Day took place 65 years ago.  The Iraq War is STILL TAKING PLACE.  There are men and women who are still dying there, and those who fought in Fallujah and buried buddies are not only still dealing with that, but many of them are still in the service and are re-deploying.  Making a GAME out of their sacrifices is just wrong."

There is more bothering the Gold Star families than the lack of respect they feel from the development of this game.

(Tracy) Miller teaches a popular course on the 1960s, including the antiwar movement. She worries that Six Days, precisely because it aims to re-create the Fallujah battle so realistically, will further desensitize youngsters to the horrors of war. And she's concerned that insurgents will learn about the operational procedures of American troops.

Ahhh, and that's the kicker.  Why worry about a real war--or, God forbid, why sign up to fight it yourself--if all you have to do is sit down in the comfort of your own home and PRETEND you are fighting it?

Especially if the soldiers and Marines who are fighting and dying with the press of a button at your fingertips?  They're not REAL.

"...how can the portrayal be accurate if a player can manipulate the events? David Waddington, an assistant professor of education at Concordia University in Montreal who has written articles about the ethics of videogames, says they cannot convey important aspects of real life, including complex characters. "You do have characters in a videogame in some sense, but ... character development isn't very robust. So you don't sympathize with characters very much."

In other words, that dark blue sedan is never going to pull up to YOUR front door.

Making it "realistic" does not, in my opinion, help people really understand.

How can you POSSIBLY understand without the FEAR?  The gut-wrenching, bowel-clenching terror of heading out on patrol each and every day, street by street, house by house, room by room?  Who's gonna get it today?  You?  Your buddy?  Your platoon leader?   They reference Dexter Filkins in that article, who was, in my opinion, one of the finest war correspondents over there.  He wrote for the New York Times, and I used to search for his stuff every day and read it.  He went right into the mouth of the beast and he was respected by the troops.  He and one outfit got pinned down by insurgents in one hellish day that saw the deaths of several of the men he was with.  When his photographer e-mailed back some photos to the Times and they put them up on their website, families protested, and he was yanked out of Iraq within days.  He wrote a book about his experiences there, and how, over time, he just slowly lost his mind.   You can't put that in a game.  

And, ultimtaely, it is a GAME.  What I resent in the first place is the almost orgasmic delight the media had in playing out this war through cool graphics and intrepid camera crews in the early days, like it was some kind of neato John Wayne movie (who did not, himself, fight in World War II even though he was old enough) or, yeah, a video game.  

What that did was give the war a feel to the public that it WAS a game or a movie and somehow not really real.  Casualties were hidden from camera crews and embedded coverage was carefully controlled, and the whole thing just seemed like a giant PR project.   

Slap a yellow magnet on your car and you, too, can support the troops!!!  

Like a football game.  America vs. Terrorists.  Popcorn!  Beer!  Rah-rah-yay!  

Until the Battle of Fallujah.  And that changed everything because it was bloody and horrible, and everyone--even field doctors and medics--were changed forever by the things they saw in Fallujah.  

I'll never forget Dustin telling me about finding two insurgents in a mosque and rounding them up, taking them prisoner.  "I looked into the eyes of one of the men," he said, "and he was absolutely terrified.  And I wondered if I looked the same way to him."  

Until those avid gamers know what it's like for bullets to come right at them out of the TV screens and blow the head off the buddy sitting on the couch next to them, then there IS no "realism."  Because that's the only "realism" that matters to me.  

Mr. Tampte's investors pulled out their financial backing after the Gold Star families formally protested the game, and he has not, as yet, been able to line up new ones.  He is struggling to save his business, and bewildered because he's convinced himself that what he was really doing was "honoring" the troops who served in Fallujah.  

If he really wants to honor them, he should attend a few funerals.  He should stand right behind a weeping family member who is handed the tri-corner flag--close enough that he can hear, "On behalf of a grateful nation..."  

He should go home, then, with some of the widows and widowers, watch their suffering children in their subdued and silent play.  

He should watch them walk past the greeting-card aisle on Mother's Day or on Father's Day as they hurry past, averting their eyes, fighting back tears.  

War is not a game.  Father's Day with an empty chair at the table is all too real.

I'm not proud of this.

But if I want to deal with a difficult issue honestly, I have to tell the truth.

Back in 1972, while I was still in college, and after a series of personal crises had left me rudderless, I was befriended by a group of young people who were active in evangelical Christian circles; two of whom had attended Bob Jones University.  (Yes, THAT Bob Jones.  The one that prohibited inter-racial dating as recently as this decade.)

In my previous post, "How Religion Ruined Politics and Politics Ruined Religion," I wrote about that time in my life, so I'm not going to go into any more detail here, but suffice it to say that I was very lonely, and those friendships met a need at the time.

That spring, I was deeply worried about an old and dear friend with whom I'd had a romantic relationship, off and on, for years (at the time, it was off), because he was a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam.  When I found out that he had, indeed, returned safely from his tour, had rotated out of the Army, and was at home before leaving for a new life in West Texas, I traveled to my hometown to visit him.

I can still remember how he looked then, how broad and strong his shoulders were from months spent humping a rucksack through the jungle, how sexy in his cowboy hat.  He was 6'4" tall and I was a foot shorter.  I was visiting with his mom in the living room when he drove up into the driveway in the new, gold, '72 El Camino he'd bought, and I ran out and threw my arms around his neck.  He hoisted me up in one arm and carried me effortlessly into the house.

We visited a while with his mom, and then he had some things to bring in from the truck, so I followed him out, and he handed me a bag to carry.

We were happy and laughing, and I grinned up at him and said, "Who was yo niggah last year?"

That was a cute little saying I'd picked up from some of my new friends.  I'm ashamed to admit that I did not think anything of it at the time.

This, from a young woman who had black friends and who had worked and written about civil rights while in college.  Who'd been outraged at incidents of racism her whole life.

It would be easy to blame my new friends, but they hadn't made the remark.  I had. 

Thoughtlessly, stupidly.

My friend, Kent, stopped what he was doing, stood up to his full height, and in a stern voice I'm sure he normally reserved for clueless privates, he said, "That's not very funny.  It's a terrible thing to say."

And when he turned away, I stood there, dumbstruck at the truth of his words, my own humiliation, and inner self-rage that I had fallen into such a careless, thoughtless remark so easily, when I thought I knew myself better than that.

Later, I learned that in the month before Kent had departed Vietnam for home, they'd pulled him out of the jungle and sent him to a rear area, where one of his tasks had been to quell civil rights unrest among the men.  He did so with the help of a black sergeant who was as big as he was, a man for whom the young lieutenant had felt nothing but respect, admiration, and affection.

I never made that remark--or any other like it--again.

Eventually, I found some new friends.

Two years later, I married Kent, and have remained married to him for a very happy 35 years.

I'm recalling that cheek-burning incident now in order to use myself as a prime example of what I call "hidden hate speech."

Most of us who have any kind of functioning brain cells know how dangerous hate speech can be, whether spewed over the airwaves, blasted onto the Web, or circulated in nasty e-mails.  Especially following the recent presidential campaign and inauguragion of the country's first black president, we've all recoiled in horror at some of the things we've seen and heard.

Most of us who love our president, supported him, and voted for him, worry a great deal about his personal safety.

Newsworthy tragedies like the recent murder of an abortion doctor only reinforce our anxiety about rising hate speech and hate crimes in this country.

Like one Supreme Court justice's definition of pornography, we all know hate speech when we hear it.

But sometimes, we don't know it when we speak it ourselves.

Or worse, we know it when we hear it, but we say nothing.

Understand that I'm not talking about just African Americans here.  Hate speech and hate crimes spread like bloodstains and affect all sorts of minorities--from Latinos who catch the brunt of illegal alien-hate, to gays who are the victims of homophobia, to Muslim-Americans, who must endure the suspicions of a population conditioned by the previous administration to think of all of them as terrorists.

Ever since Barack Obama gained prominence with his eloquence and powerful speaking ability, his opponents and enemies have dismissed some of his most stirring speeches as "just words."

And yet, ask most any American what he or she thinks of, say, the Gettysburg Address, and see them grow misty-eyed.

Ask if they've heard the words, "I have a dream."

Ask if they're familiar with, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

Ask if they've ever studied the words, "All we have to fear, is fear itself."

And ask how they felt when the leader of the free world, when he was questioned about the growing strength of an insurgency in Iraq, famously replied, "Bring it on."

Words matter.

It wasn't until I moved to West Texas and began bringing up my two children, who are 31 and 29 now, that I realized how much words--and the actions behind them--matter.  Most of the prejudice I encountered was directed toward the Mexican-American population because, I suspect, they were a larger minority out here than the African-Americans.

Still, racism seemed to be all around us.  In jokes, for instance.

Or, careless remarks (some not-so-careless) like the one I'd made years ealier.  

When my kids started school, I really had to swim against the current to encourage them to make inter-racial friendships, but I made it clear that any and all of their friends were welcome in our home at any time.  The first time my son, who was six, had a sleepover with a friend away from home, it was with a Hispanic family.

But it wasn't until they got into high school that I began to feel the sting that hidden hate speech and subtle racism can bring.  By that time, many of my son's best friends, for instance, were Hispanic.

And it started to cost US, his parents, friendships with some (I emphasize: SOME) of our white friends.

We didn't realize it at first.  It took a little time.  But gradually, we began to figure it out.

Not that we gave a great big flying damn.

During that time, I had a weekly newspaper column in the local paper called, "Country Life," about bringing up kids in the country, but I wrote about many things.  One time I wrote about gays, about how, basically, they are people too, how they're not pedophiles, and so on, and I talked about my married friends, Steve and Scott.

The next day, I got a two-sentence letter in the snail-mail from my publisher, firing me. 

He said, "Thank you for your promptness," on account of how I'd never missed a deadline in 16 years.  And that, as they say, was that.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that it's not easy, in a social setting, to do what my then-future-husband did to me:  Stand up straight and say, in effect, That's a terrible thing to say.

Psychologists say that, from an evolutionary standpoint, just about the greatest fear that men and women have is not the fear of death.

It is the fear of being shunned by society.

This is because, when primitive mankind traveled together from cave to cave in tribes, the worst punishment that could be bestowed upon a tribal member was to be ostracized--shunned--from the tribe, because to be kicked out of the cave was, most likely, to die.

This is one primeval reason that so many people fear public speaking.  The fear of making a fool of one's self, or of being judged as somehow unfit for the tribe, is a deep fear.

In this time of the Internet and polarization, many of us have sort of drifted into one sort of chosen tribe or another, based on our common mutual interests and points of view.

I happen to hang out with a kind of tribe who wouldn't dream of telling a racist joke or making a stupid remark like the one I made back in college in my bonehead days.

So, what happens is, we get lulled into a certain complacency, and by that I mean, we don't tend to encounter prejudice on an overt basis so much in our daily lives, partly because it has been legislated out of the workplace (as one example) and partly because we don't see it in our friends.

But prejudice--and the malevolence behind it--has only gone underground, so to speak.  Into the closet.  It's hidden, but it's there, and if we had any doubts about that (which I never did), we sure saw it during the recent campaign, and here again, with the nomination battle over Judge Sotomayor who, you may remember, is "not too smart," even though she was valedictorian of her high school senior class, won the Pyne Prize for academic excellence at Princeton, and edited the Yale Law Review.

(I don't recall anyone ever saying that John Roberts wasn't too smart, and his credentials were less impressive than hers are now.)

When tragedies like Dr. Tiller's murder happen, we recoil in collective horror, but we should not be surprised, because the truth is that the number of hate groups out there, and the places where hate speech is easily disseminated to an eager audience, has gone up FIFTY PERCENT since 2000.

So...what can we do about it?  How can we fight back against hate speech?  How can we, figuratively if not literally, stand up strong and say, "That's a terrible thing to say"?

For many years now, I have been a supporter of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and I can think of no better place to start rethinking hate speech.

Once, a commenter on one of my posts singled out the SPLC as a "radical left" group.

Oh for heaven's sake.  That's hogwash.  Utter nonsense.

Begun back in the '70's as a civil rights law firm by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, the SPLC branched out in the '80's by taking on the foundational hate-group of all time, the KKK.  When years of criminal prosecutions had resulted in few--if any--verdicts and/or sentences against KKK members who'd participated in assassinations, lynchings, beatings, kidnappings, and murders, the SPLC began to bring lawsuits against individuals and groups in CIVIL court.  The resulting cash settlements have broken the back of many of the largest, most powerful hate-groups in existence in this country, by simply bankrupting them.

Consequently, they began a serious effort to monitor and catalogue hate groups and hate crimes nation-wide, and their data base grew to be so impressive that the FBI began to consult them, which it continues to do so, to this day.

Their quarterly Intelligence Report puts together a comprehensive study of many of those crimes, the crime trends, successful prosecutions, and progress made in combating hate crimes, and is subscribed to by hundreds of law enforcement agencies in the country.  I get mine in the mail, but you can read it online anytime.

To my way of thinking, nothing the SPLC has done in its distinguished history can touch the work they've done through schools all over the country, with their free Teaching Tolerance classroom materials.  Through grants, multi-media kits, handbooks, and their monthly magazine, Teaching Tolerance provides useful classroom materials that enable teachers to enhance their students' understanding of the cultural history and accomplishments of many minority groups and to increase their sensitivity to forms of bigotry such as homophobia.

Located next to the SPLC center in Montgomery, Alabama (which has been bombed once, by the way, and Morris Dees deals with daily threats on his life), is the Civil Rights Memorial, designed by Vietnam memorial artist Maya Lin, and contains the names of those who fought and died for civil rights.  Water flows over the names 24 hours a day, and the site is open to all for quiet contemplation.

Also located at the SPLC headquarters is a 20-by-40 foot Wall of Tolerance, in which the names of thousands of supporters who have pledged to take a stand against hate, injustice, and intolerance and to work for justice, equality, and human rights are available on an Interactive display.  If you should ever get a chance to visit that wall in Montgomery, do me a favor and check it out.  You'll find my name among the number, and I may not get the chance in this lifetime to see it for myself.

In the meantime, there is another way you can stand strong against hate.  You can go to the SPLC "Stand Strong Against Hate" interactive map, which designates pinpoints in two colors.  The red dots indicate hate groups located in this country.

The green dots and squares represent men and women like you and me who have pledged to stand up whenever we see or hear acts of hate in our area.  When I entered my name and zip code for my own little green dot, up popped my home state of Texas, which, according to the site, hosts 66 hate groups.

And lots and lots of green. 

Another thing you can do is visit the SPLC homepage, (link provided above) and if you've got a few bucks to spare, I strongly encourage you to make a donation, because right now, there are more hate groups and hate crimes in this country than at any other time, and our president received more threats against his life in the days following his inauguration than any other president, according to the Secret Service.

If you haven't got any money to donate, that's fine.  All you have to do is speak out.  Words are free.

Words matter in this world.  Violent acts of hatred do not need to be confronted with further violent acts of hatred.

Violent words--no matter how well-meaning or couched in a joke--do not need to be confronted with violence, either.

Sometimes all it takes is a simple, "That's a terrible thing to say."

 

 

When I was in college back in the 70's, a series of personal and family tragedies that occurred back to back during my junior year left me emotionally shipwrecked and set apart from the vast majority of my classmates, whose biggest problem in life was what to wear to the spring formal or whether they'd pass an exam. 

Cut adrift from familiar shores, lost and alone, I floated into the current of the campus Christian evangelical community, and consequently accepted Christ as my personal savior and was baptised in a Southern Baptist church back home.

Because I never do anything halfway, I embraced my new life right down to my soul, so to speak, joining Campus Crusades for Christ, taking Bible courses as electives, going door to door saving souls, working as a "counselor" at Billy Graham movies, serving as a summer camp counselor at a Christian camp, dating seminary students, and after graduation, teaching at a private Christian academy in another state.

Because the Bible stated that "believers should not be yoked to non-believers," that meant freezing out many of my old friends, listening only to Christian music and reading Christian books, and so on.  Back then, Christianity had not yet become a multi-billion dollar industry, and so that dictate was harder than you might think.  I had to mix up my own cassette tapes of Christian music, although many of my friends frowned upon my collection of Mormon Tabernacle Choir music because everybody knew they were a cult and therefore, Satanic.

I'd hear stuff like that and just toss it off and not dwell on it too much.  I didn't think anyone who could make such astonishing music could be anything BUT close to God.  The lack of tolerance for even listening to their music baffled me, but I didn't argue about it.  I just privately played their soaring, blessed "Halleluyah Chorus" and didn't talk about it much.

And the popular self-help books I read, all about stuff like, how to submit myself to my lord and master--meaning, my future husband--well, that kinda bugged me too, but after all, I did want to find myself a good Christian husband, because every Singles Bible class I attended concentrated on husband-finding as if being a single woman were some sort of tragic disability.  You literally did think there was something wrong with you if you had no husband or marriage prospects on the near horizon, and so you took more Singles classes so you could figure out what you were doing wrong and fix it before all the Good Christian Men were taken.

But, basically, I was more of the intellectual Christian than the emotional one.  I didn't buy into the whole speaking-in-tongues and laying on of hands and other excesses of the faith.  In fact, I grew tired of the Baptists pretty quick because every single solitary sermon said the exact same thing, and so I found a nondenominational congregation near my campus and went three times a week.

Usually, I attended lectures where the speakers translated Bible verses from the original Hebrew or Aramaic, and I read bestselling Christian authors like C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, who were known as the philosophical vanguards of the faith, and who dealt in the Deeper Questions of life.  Some of their reading was dense, but that was the challenge and the joy and, I confess, gave me a bit of a feeling of superiority over those who didn't read much at all but who did things like, stop taking their epilepsy medicine because "Jesus is going to heal me."

(That guy was later found by police, wandering down the street in his underwear.)

I had a boyfriend who was a seminary student at a non-denominational institution that was--and is to this day--highly respected, and he and his friends and I would have many all-nighters debating such heavy theological issues as dispensationalism, predestination, literal-versus-symbolic interpretation of scripture, and so on.  I took a comprehensive Bible class in the New Testament from the Moody Bible Institute, another respected institution, by correspondence, and after a couple of years, I could hold my own with the best born-and-bred Bible thumpers, even if my family and old friends worried that I'd lost my mind.

In a way, I had.  I just didn't know it at the time.

The comedown, when it came, came hard and fast and violently.  Teaching at the Christian academy, it wasn't just the undercurrent of prejudice (only white students and faculty), or the haphazard educational standards or poor availability of textbooks and supplies--it was coming face to face with the thunderous judgementalism, hypocrisy, and mean-spiritedness that I encountered from colleagues with otherwise impeccable gospel standards. 

What that enviornment was doing to the students drove me to a near nervous breakdown and I quit at Christmas break, for my own sanity.  When, a few months later, I reconnected with an old and dear friend with whom I'd been romantically involved, off and on, for many years--before the whole evangelical thing--and decided to marry him, the reaction from my evangelical friends at my old Baptist church back home shocked me to my core.

Because he was a privately spiritual person but averse to organized religion, they deemed him a "nonbeliever."  When my pastor's entreaties that I not marry "this man" did not work, he said he'd go ahead and perform the ceremony, "because there are some things I want to say."

I trusted him.  He was my pastor.

That was my first mistake.

At my wedding ceremony, in front of everyone invited, he scorched my now-husband and me with a patronizing lecture, scolding me about how I should understand "what it means to obey" my husband, and launching such a towering sermon that a future sister-in-law on the front pew whispered, "Everybody stay seated.  There's going to be a baptismal after the service."

When we kissed, the pastor scowled and dug his toe into the carpet, fleeing the church almost immediately.  He did not come to the reception.

He never spoke to me again.  None of my old Christian evangelical "friends" ever spoke to me again, although one did visit once, "because I wanted to reassure myself that what they were all saying about you wasn't true."  Apparently, it was, because I never heard from her again, either.

I've been "yoked to that nonbeliever" for 35 years now, and a stronger, kinder, more patient and spiritual man you won't find anywhere.  We raised our kids out in the country around animals and nature, with deep spiritual beliefs, having family devotionals every Sunday they were growing up, often outdoors in our Chinaberry Grove, because neither of us could really feel comfortable in churches for very long.

I have not, in fact, "submitted" myself to my husband, who is a 6'4" combat vet.  I'm a feminist--not afraid of the word--and he's secure enough in his manhood not to be threatened by that.  We've worked in partnership to raise two strong, independent kids.  My daughter supports herself and doesn't put up with crap from guys looking for wilting daisies, and my ex-Marine combat-vet son has no problem cleaning house or cooking dinner for his beautiful girlfriend.  (You got a problem with that???)

When I look back on who I was during that terribly vulnerable time in my life, a time when I was lost in grief and searching for comfort, I am amazed that I did not make so many mistakes I could have made, had I truly, truly listened to what they were trying to make me into.  I shudder to think what a disastrous marriage I might have made had I married any of the churchy guys my pastor kept fixing me up with.  (One of them was a college drop-out, unemployed, and didn't have a car, so the pastor loaned him a car and probably gave him some cash for the date.  As for his uncertain future, well, the Lord will provide, dontcha know.)

When I was a young mother, and Ronald Reagan embraced Jerry Falwell in his presidential campaign, I knew right away what was happening and what was about to happen, and I knew that it was ultimately going to be very bad for our country.  The hypocrisy of the religious right for hero-worshiping a man who did not himself ever go to church and whose wife consulted astrologers did not surprise me.

You'd be surprised what they can shut out of their minds when they don't want to face a truth.  (Although, what with the Creationist Museum and so on, maybe you wouldn't.)

From Reagan's massive success garnering votes from the religious right, Republican politicians began licking their chops.  Not only were they a reliable block vote--easily manipulated with emotional "wedge" issues--but they were a bottomless well of easy cash.

After having been willingly whipped into a frenzy over those very social issues, the religious right saw politics as the way to manipulate policy and gain power, and they embraced their new-found influence with a messianic zeal.

It was a holy marriage made in hell.

By the time Karl Rove got his plump little hands on it, "voting guides" were being passed out to congregations on Sundays and voter registration drives conducted in church buildings.  And that does not even count what was going on in evangelical television, radio, and publishing.

You were basically told who to vote for, and if you did not, well, you weren't Christian enough.  In fact, some Catholic churches threatened to kick you out of the church altogether for supporting Democrats.  At Jerry Falwell's own "Liberty University," you can get kicked off-campus these days for supporting Barack Obama.

The beauty of the whole system is the ease of manipulating and disseminating information, because of the way evangelicals isolate themselves from the entire "nonbelieving" world.  Christian evangelicals befriend, marry, worship, and educate their children with other Christian evangelicals; often they work in the evangelical community.  They watch Christian TV, listen to Christian radio, read Christian books, visit Christian websites.  (They even sin with other Christians; it's not unusual for online affairs--sexual and otherwise--to occur in Christian chat rooms.) 

So to cynics like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney--who admit that in private, they themselves are not religious--the evangelical community is putty in their hands.  How easy it was, for instance, for them to sell a war based on nothing more than waving flags, yellow-ribbon magnets, and "support the troops" church-drives and prayer lists, with a good, solid dose of fear thrown in; fear of the "other," of rabid Muslims coming into our mostly-white, gated communities and destroying our way of life.

They don't question anything, because to question is to lead to answers they may not want to hear, and they are afraid that questioning tenets of the faith as flat-out literal, would be to see the whole thing collapse.  In truth, it's just the opposite--the more I questioned my own beliefs, the deeper my faith grew--it was different, certainly, but deeper.  (I now include Eastern traditions and Native American beliefs in with a symbolic interpretation of the Bible, and I continue to question things, every day.) 

But this lack of questioning is how they fail to see a dichotomy in accepting that a black presidential candidate can be both a radical Christian like the Jeremiah Wright-guy they saw on TV hundreds of times a day, AND a closet Muslim terrorist.  You just don't question.

I watched all of this unfold through the years with a particular kind of horror, because I knew the flip-side of sanctimonious piety.

In fact, Jesus knew it too--when he faced the Sadducees and Pharisees.  It was not the Romans, really, who crucified Jesus.

It was religious extremists who demanded purity tests of him that he ignored.  The price was his execution.

By torture.

Another little fact so conveniently ignored by the religious right.

Someone who has first-hand knowledge of the danger to this country in combining religion and politics is a man who lived it first-hand.  His name is Frank Schaeffer.

Yes, THAT Schaeffer.  The Francis Schaeffer whose books we read and debated in college Christian circles was Frank Schaeffer's dad.  During the zoom-growth years of the 80's, the Schaeffers basically created the Religious Right.  They were embraced by all the big evangelical names of the day:  Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, James Dobson, and others.

Republican presidents had them over to the White House, and powerful conservative politicians not only courted them, but had them speak to fellow conservative senators and congresspeople.

It was Frank Schaeffer who literally wrote the book (and made the movie) on the abortion issue that was to set the movement on fire--a fire that soon raged out of control and eventually resulted in "pro-life" bombings and assassinations, a tragedy that Schaeffer accepts responsibility for--probably more than he should, really.

But at least he's got the balls to admit it.

In the end, Schaeffer's own emotional and spiritual fall from evangelical graces was, like mine, hard, fast, and violent--but in his case, it was far more agonizing because he had invested his entire life in it, and because he knew, first-hand, things I had only intuited: that something was very, very rotten in Denmark.

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My friend Robby, God bless him, has endured my writing about him before, so I don't think he would mind if I do it again--this time, in response to a phone call he made to me today in which he really did say, as soon as I answered the phone: 

"Thank you for not blaming me for the rest of my party's insanity."

Some of you may remember that Robby is my friend who is a bona fide, card-carrying right-wing Republican.  A passionate gun collector and member of the NRA, he actually LIKES Ann Coulter and Ted Nugent ("I wish I was their illegitimate child"), Chuck Norris is one of his heroes, and he's one of the dwindling minority who believes George W. Bush was...well, if not actually a GOOD president...he, er, MEANT WELL.

You'd think we'd hate one another, but we've been friends for years, and no one else could have possibly been more supportive of me when my son was deployed--and I say that knowing that I gave him utter, outraged, infuriated HELL about Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld year after year, and he took it because he loves me and because he understood how terrified I was for my son.  Eventually, he even came to see my point where the war was concerned.

But during the recent presidential campaign, Robby called me one day to say that he had given up listening to talk radio, something he had done faithfully for more than 15 years.  The blatant racism he heard there was so offensive to him that he complained to me that, "My party ran away from me," and that, as far as people like Rush Limbaugh were concerned:  "I don't know who they think I am when they claim to speak for conservative Republicans, because I am not that person."

Of course he voted for McCain, but he told me that, even though he disagreed with Obama on most things and would have preferred seeing a Republican back in the White House, he considered Obama to be calm, rational, reasoned, intelligent, and careful about making decisions.

(Something, by the way, my conservative Republican brother has also said.)

It was Robby who came to me when the viral e-mail campaign started going around in earnest to conservatives, claiming that Obama was dead-set to take away all our guns.  Robby had checked those claims out himself, both in legitimate websites such as the NRA, and in right-wing political blogs, and said that, as far as he could tell, it was all sheer baloney.

"Obama has never said a single word, not during the campaign, and not since he's taken office, that would appear to validate these fear-mongering e-mails," he said.  "As far as I'm concerned, they have been started and kept going by gun-sellers and others who stand to profit from panic-buying."

He was disgusted at that because it meant he couldn't find ammunition just to go to target practice, and felt that the constant hysteria whipped up by those e-mails--juxtaposed to Obama's calm, sensible demeanor--was making his party look crazier and crazier, which, as a lifelong Republican, he resented.

It's been one thing after another.

Today, he called because he was just so embarrassed, this time, by the whole Judge Sotomayor frenzy.

I said, "My husband just told me he'd gotten three e-mails today all about how Judge Sotomayor is going to take away all our guns."

With a heavy sigh, he said, "And yet, just yesterday, President Obama signed into law a provision that will allow gun enthusiasts to carry loaded weapons in national parks."

"I know," I said, "and there are a lot of us on the left who are dismayed at that.  It was an ammendment stuck onto the budget by a conservative congressman, and he really wanted the budget passed, so he had to hold his nose and sign it."

"But that's the thing about it that I appreciate," he replied.  "He didn't go before the cameras and make this big show about how he was being forced to sign the law even though he hated it.  He just did it quietly.  He knew that, the political reality of any sitting president is that they have to make onerous political sacrifices sometimes in order to get something bigger and more important passed later on.  None of them like it, but they all have to do it eventually. 

"The difference with Obama," he added, "is that he doesn't grandstand about it."

I commented about the presence of so many Blue Dog Democrats who'd been elected from very conservative states, such as Montana and Utah, who have pressed the president on gun rights.  They have to be able to show their constituents that they have upheld their pro-life, pro-gun values.  It doesn't mean that he has to sell out to them, but it does mean that he has to give them little victories now and then so that he can count on them later for the big things, like health care and energy legislation.

We talked about how, if the Republican Party really wants to keep from disintigrating, it is going to have to reach out to a few "Blue Dogs" in its own party, meaning, moderates like Colin Powell and others with more nuanced views on national security and more liberal views on social issues such as gay rights.

In other words, they have to move toward the middle.  And in a situation such as the one facing Republicans right now--they'd better, if they want to survive.

Robby told me about a right-wing friend of his who still listens to talk-radio, and how frustrated he's grown with her blind acceptance of everything she hears there.  "They're still talking about the Muslim connection," he complained.  "Can you believe that?"

The thing is, Robby is a loyal Republican, and he is a conservative--make no mistake about that--but he feels that the party has tilted SO far to the right that now they seem to be embracing only the loudest, most extreme points of view as representative of the party as a whole, which he finds deeply embarrassing and deeply offensive.  He knows there's a fairly obvious undercurrent of racism to the whole thing, and even though he's a white male redneck (and proud of it)--that does not mean he is racist.

My sister, who is also a conservative Republican, understands that very well.  After the death of our daddy in his 40's, my mother moved my much-younger sisters to Texarkana, where they grew up.  (I'd grown up in Dallas and was already in college and out of the house.)

So my sister pretty much embraced the whole Southern redneck, biker, beer-drinking, country-music-listening themes of that background, well into her adulthood.  But a few years ago, after a particularly painful divorce, she moved, first to anything-goes Austin, where she lived for four or five years, and then to Abilene, which is also a conservative city, but not in the same way as Texarkana.

"Family values" yes.  Racist attacks on a sitting president, no.

And over time, her viewpoints changed.  Though still conservative in many ways, she was a big Obama supporter even before I was, only the campaign was much harder on her, emotionally, than it was for me, because she was still on the right-wing e-mail merry-go-round, and every day, she received the most vile, hateful, nasty stuff in her Inbox from her former "friends."

Usually, she'd forward them on to me to debunk, and even though she told some of the people on her list--or maybe BECAUSE she told them--that she was an Obama supporter, they continued to flood her mailbox with crap.

Eventually, she met a truly fine man, and fell deeply in love for possibly the last--if not the first--time in her life, and moved to be closer to him.

And then one day, she got an e-mail from one of her old right-wing friends.  It was titled, "Ships Named for Presidents."  There was the U.S.S. George Bush and the U.S.S. Bill Clinton, and so on.

Then there was the "U.S.S. Barack Obama."

And the photograph depicted a rattletrap Haitian refugee boat, laden with black people, some hanging off the edges.

This one was the proverbial camel-straw--immediately she responded to the "friend" who had sent it, saying, "I thought you should know that I have a new boyfriend whom I love very much.  And he is an African-American."

She said she never heard from that person again.  Doesn't expect to.  Doesn't want to.

What these two stories of people close to me tells me is something that is verified by an op-ed written by Nicholas D. Kristof in today's New York Times:  "Would You Slap Your Father?  If So, You're a Liberal."

It starts out pretty funny, describing various studies that show the differences between, not just points of view of liberals and conservatives, but emotions as well.

In one study, participants were asked if they were performing in a comedy skit that required them to slap their fathers, and they asked his permission, and he said yes--would they do it?

Those who leaned liberal, the study said, would do so as long as Dad said it would be okay. 

Those who leaned conservative would NEVER slap their fathers, under any circumstances, for any reason.

Kristof writes:

 

"The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren't a result of a deliberative process. The crucial part of the brain for these judgments is the medial prefrontal cortex, which has more to do with moralizing than with rationality. If you damage your prefrontal cortex, your I.Q. may be unaffected, but you'll have trouble harrumphing.

"One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty -- and revulsion at disgust."

 

Referring to a column he'd written before on the subject of differences between liberals and conservatives, Kristof says he'd suggested that the best way for people of any persuasion to open themselves up to the best information (rather than spoon-feeding themselves from the pool of like minds), was to engage someone of the opposite point of view in lively debate from time to time.

But a scientist friend called Kristof on that theory, explaining that all such a process would do is "inflame antagonisms."

In other words, neither of us would change our minds, but would most likely wind up with wounded feelings and maybe a cutting-off of a relationship.

So how, as Kristof says, "do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empiracal?"

It seems we should follow the example that has been set by our own president:

 

"A start is to reach out to moderates on the other side -- ideally eating meals with them, for that breaks down "us vs. them" battle lines that seem embedded in us. (In ancient times we divided into tribes; today, into political parties.) The Web site www.civilpolitics.org is an attempt to build this intuitive appreciation for the other side's morality, even if it's not our morality.

""Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart," Professor Haidt says. "Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games."

"Thus persuasion may be most effective when built on human interactions. Gay rights were probably advanced largely by the public's growing awareness of friends and family members who were gay.

"A corollary is that the most potent way to win over opponents is to accept that they have legitimate concerns, for that triggers an instinct to reciprocate. As it happens, we have a brilliant exemplar of this style of rhetoric in politics right now -- Barack Obama."

 

I wouldn't say that Robby or my sister started out as moderates, necessarily.  But no matter what they believed politically, there was one thing that both they and I had in common--none of us could abide bigotry in any form.

This was a common ground we could build upon.

Most of my family and extended family members are very conservative.  I find that when we get into lively political discussions, the best approach is to (a) remain silent on some of the crazier conspiracy-theory threads (b) stand up for my president when necessary, but do it with humor, humor, humor, and a respectful tone (c) search for common ground.

You would be surprised where you find it.

When one much-adored family member accused me of "not wanting to hear opposing points of view" because I refuse to listen to Bill O'Reilly, I named a raft of conservative columnists who I read, and said I wasn't crazy about, say, Chris Matthews, even though he's a liberal, because I don't like loud-mouths who interrupt and cut off their guests.

She confessed she didn't really like that much, either.

It's a start.

Guys, it isn't often that I do an encore post, but on this Memorial Day holiday, I thought it appropriate to run the blogpost that I did a year ago, honoring a buddy of my son's who was killed in Iraq during his second deployment, on June 28, 2006--my birthday.

That deployment had been grueling and deadly; every day one of them got either shot or "blown up."  A few days prior to that, a Humvee my son was driving had gotten hit by an IED, and the injuries he sustained then will plague him for the rest of his life.  Within the next three days following that, three members of the 3/5 Marines met their deaths bravely, including Cpl. Rex Page of Kirksville, Missouri.  Rex was 21 years old and was survived by his parents and a developmentally challenged little brother.

Not a day goes by...not one day...that I do not think of that smiling young man and his loving family.  This is my tribute to all the Rex's, of all the wars:

 

On this Memorial Day, I've heard lots of stirring speeches made by politicians at cemeteries, and quiet remembrances of veterans who have microphones shoved in their faces, and anti-war spokespeople pleading that we never again send our men and women into harm's way unless absolutely necessary.  I've also had big Memorial Day sales commercials blasted at me, and ads for outdoor grilling equipment thrust at me, and I've read the articles about how many veterans pass away each month, both of natural causes and by injuries sustained in war.

But I chose to commemorate this day by sharing a private moment that involved only one.

One of the hardest things asked of combat moms during their children's deployments is to write condolence letters to the parents or spouses of those who have fallen in our son's and daughter's units.  Often we do this while our kids are still in the line of fire.  Most of the time we did not know the men and women who have died, but we know that our children did, and we know what it would mean to each of us to receive supportive letters from the parents of our kids' buddies, should the worst happen to them.

A condolence letter, in my view, is no place for platitudes.  Words like "victory" and "glory" and, to some extent even, "hero," do not necessarily belong in a letter to a grieving spouse or parent.  Saying that someone who was the moon and stars to a shattered family, died for his or her country is too lofty, too disconnected with the tragic reality of planning funerals and filing paperwork and breaking the news to family and friends, some of them very young.

Such a loss is deeply personal, you see.  Not political.

Marine Lance Corporal Rex Page, of Kirksville, Missouri, was killed by sniper fire on June 28, 2006 in Fallujah, Iraq.  He served in my son's platoon--Third Battalion, Fifth Marine, Lima Company, 1st Platoon.  Like my son, he was a rifleman, which is the Marine equivalent to army Infantry.  A grunt, as they call themselves.

I hope Cpl. Page's (he was posthumously promoted) mom will not mind my sharing portions of the letter I wrote to her and her husband when their son was killed.  I thought that by doing so, it would help to remind us all of just why we have a Memorial Day, and why former soldiers and Marines 80 years old still weep.

I started by sharing with her how her son's death had affected my son:


"There was a day, during Dustin's deployment, that I had this queasy awful feeling all day long, and then, he called at a time that would have been three a.m. in Iraq.  I knew something terrible had happened, because he never called in the middle of the night his time, and I knew it meant that he was unable to sleep, that he just wanted to hear a voice from home.  He did not tell me then what had happened, but I didn't need to ask, because I heard the grief and heaviness in his voice.

"I just wanted to hear news from home," he said.  And so we talked about family, and pets, and chatty things that did not matter, but I knew something terrible had happened and suddenly said, "Honey, I just wanted you to know that we never, ever forget about you.  Not for one moment, not for one instant.  We think about you and pray for you every moment of every day.

"And when I hung up, I sobbed and sobbed and I didn't even know why.

"The next day I heard about your boy, and he was the third 3/5 Marine in three days that week to be killed, but he was the first from my son's platoon, and I was devastated all over again even though I did not know Rex.

"I didn't have to know him, if that made sense."


I went on to say that it was hard to know what to say to a grieving parent, but that I'd decided to tell them what their son's life and death had meant to my son.


"When Dustin first got home," I wrote, "he would not talk to anybody about what had happened to them over there.  He was angry and wanted to be alone.  He would leave the house for hours.  It took him a couple of weeks before he was even able to talk about this with his dad.

"Then, about midnight the night before he went back to Pendleton, I sensed that he was still up.  I got out of bed and looked out the kitchen window, and he was sitting out back under the stars with a beer.  I went out and joined him.  We live on a small ranch in a very remote part of West Texas, and there are a bazillion stars and it is very quiet except for the wind and animals.

"He was glad to see me and we talked of all kinds of things.  And then, he started to tell me about the men they had lost--he knew the others, too, but Rex was the only one in his platoon.  Of course, he called him 'Page,' as they all do in the Marines.  Half the time we moms don't even know the first names of their best buddies.  'Page was a good guy,' he said.  'A really good guy.'

"Dustin told me what a good Marine Rex was.  Dustin was a fire team leader on this deployment, and for a while, he had Rex on his team, but another leader sort of took him away--I'm not sure how these things work in the Marines--but Dustin said he was pissed when he lost Rex from his fire team and did his best to get Rex back but was not able to.

"What that tells me, with my knowledge of soldiering, is that your son was such a good Marine to have around that fire team leaders were literally fighting over him--in a good way!

"Dustin said Rex was larger-than-life, funny and goofy and kind, and absolutely dependable in battle.  The kind of guy you would want to have in your platoon.  The kind of guy you NEED.

"He told me why Rex had enlisted in the first place, and what a terrible loss his death had been to them all, especially so close to their getting to go home, and how angry he was for his buddy.

"When Rex was hit, Dustin was the first member of the platoon to get up to the roof where Rex was.  He told me, in a quiet, calm voice under the stars that night, about the heroism of the '21-year old medic' who fought valiantly to save Rex's life.  'He brought him back,' he said.

"And Rex fought too.  'He fought, Mama,' Dustin said.  'He fought so hard to live.  He made it all the way to TQ.'  That would be Taqqadum Air Force Base.

"It was the first real friend Dustin had lost to war.  And he took it hard.

"I just want you to know that your boy was never alone, that his fellow Marines fought with all their hearts to keep from losing him, and that they all grieve, and will continue to do so, for the rest of their lives.

"I want you to know that your son fought bravely and well, that he was liked by everybody, and that he is missed by more people than just his family and friends back home.  My son, for one, who has seen more death than anybody ever ought to have seen in a lifetime, much less a young lifetime, is haunted by your son's memory and will never forget him."


I wanted this sweet boy's family to understand how that can be, how it is that their child's memory lives on, so I shared, first, all the immediate Mills family members who were veterans and those who--at the time--were on active duty.  (At that time, we had five family members on active duty; three of them have done, so far, six combat deployments to Iraq, and one to Afghanistan.)  Then, I told them about an experience my husband, Kent, had in Vietnam.


"My husband is a combat veteran.  He was a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam...Kent told Dustin about how, when he was a young lieutenant in Viet Nam, he once sent a squad of men to the stream to refill their canteens with water.  They were ambushed by Viet Cong and a young private was killed in the firefight.  He was the only one lost from my husband's platoon.

"To this day, when you ask Kent about that boy, his eyes redden and fill with tears.  Once, he visited a traveling exhibit of the Vietnam memorial Wall, and brought home a penciled shadow-stencil of that young man's name, which he had not forgotten, not in 30 years.

"Kent told Dustin that for a very long time, he had blamed himself for that young private's death.  And then one day he decided that, the best way he could honor that boy's memory was to live a life that brought honor to his name and to his loss, to live a life that young man would have lived if he could have.

"I can tell you that Dustin and the other guys who knew Rex and fought by his side will never forget your son.  I know that Dustin and the others will carry the vibrant memory of Rex Page in their hearts for the rest of their lives.  And I know that Dustin, for one, will live a life that will bring honor to Rex's memory.  He will live a life Rex would have been proud to live.  I know because he told me so, under the stars."


I told Rex's parents how, for other Marine families, each homecoming of their loved ones from war is a bittersweet thing, and that I, for one, had wept for the Pages and other bereaved families when my own son had called from Maine to say the unit was on American soil and on their way home to Pendleton.

I told them that they would remain in my thoughts and prayers, and that I would never forget them or their son.

And so I have not.

Rex's mom did write me back, several pages in neat longhand.  She told me about her son, and about how the Marines had taken good care of their family throughout the funeral, and how much solace and support they'd taken from their church.

They seemed to be coping as well as anyone can whose entire world has just been ripped apart.

This blogpost is a tribute to all the Rex Page's out there, past and present and future, and to all the families who must endure so much for love of their country.

We've lost more than 4,000 Rex Page's now in Iraq and more than 400 in Afghanistan.  I've heard some claim--callously, if you ask me--that such loss doesn't compare, say, with Vietnam, when we lost 58,000, or other wars where so many of our bravest and best gave their lives.

But when it comes to Memorial Day and other days like it, I can tell you that veterans everywhere are not thinking of big numbers.  They're thinking of the men and women they knew and served with, laughed and trained with, fought with, and watched die.

And in that case, there is always, always...only one.