The Blogging Will Continue Until Morale Improves

With just a month to go before the election, it's still looking like a close one - although the College National Republican Committee shows that Bush is gaining rapidly among young voters, according to WashPost/ABC polls:

A recent Washington Post/ABC poll shows President Bush leading John Kerry among young voters by 12 points, 53-41%.

Since August, John Kerry lost 20 points and the President gained 18 points--a 38-point turnaround! The following is the polling data of the 18-30 year-old registered voters:

Washington Post / ABC August 1
Bush 35%
Kerry 61%

Washington Post/ABC August 30
Bush 45%
Kerry 53%

Washington Post / ABC September 10
Bush 46%
Kerry 49%

Washington Post / ABC September 28
Bush 53%
Kerry 41%

I attended a hastily-convened meeting of the Republican students at PSU last week. They put up a booth at the opening-week event, and I was pleased to see they attracted lots of positive attention. (I couldn't help out with the GOP booth because I was volunteering at the Jewish Students' Union booth ... and I'm pleased to say that we had plenty of interest too.)

I don't know whether I'll be able to post as frequently now that I'm going to classes, but I do expect to be keeping this blog up on a regular basis. I already have several posts planned for this week. Stay tuned.

Morning Report: September 24, 2004

Informal Morning Report. Since I'm away from home and sneaking a little dial-up time from my hotel room before re-convening with my fellow Marine vets, I'm just going to drop a few lines on current events.

Bush, Allawi speak out. Caught GWB and Iyad Allawi on TV yesterday morning, with their impressive news conference, shortly after Allawi's address to the US Congress. Allawi thanked the American people and Congress for liberating his country, and stated, "more troops we don't need" - rather, he said, Iraqis need to be empowered to take charge of their own affairs through continued training and support. Allawi and Bush both stressed that while tough challenges lie ahead, Iraq is moving in the right direction.

Senator Kerry wasted no time in declaring that the Prime Minister of Iraq didn't know what he was talking about, and today's issue of the Jayson Blair Journal began its editorial with the words "Iraq's appointed leader, Iyad Allawi, put on an impressive performance yesterday in Washington." Iraq's self-appointed leaders in New York explained that 'Until Iraq holds free elections, Mr. Allawi cannot claim to speak for more than the narrow coalition of exile parties that maneuvered his appointment as interim prime minister.' The JBJ editorial went on to link Allawi with a small cabal of CIA-backed exile groups, and concluded by accusing Iraq's Prime Minister of 'expressing doubts about the value of a free press and refusing to accept the importance of an honest and realistic discussion of what's happening in his country.'

Funny, just last night I was up talking with two young guys who just got back from a second tour in Iraq; they happened to be staying in the room next door. Nobody forced these Marines to re-up, they did so voluntarily. They recalled that in fifteen of Iraq's eighteen provinces, security and reconstruction are proceeding at an astonishing pace. Wonder what's wrong with them. Maybe they don't read the Jayson Blair Journal enough?

Soldier, Where's Your Hatred Now?

By an anonymous soldier of the 136th Field Artillery Battalion, 37th Infantry Division - Fiji Islands, March 1943.

SOLDIER, WHERE'S YOUR HATRED NOW? (F.I., March 1943)

Soldier,
Where's your hatred now?
You haven't any? But you ought to have.
Remember the advice we gave.
Where will you be anyhow
If you forget that you must fight,
That they are wrong, and we are right?
You must make their heads to bow.

"I will fight because I must.
My hatred falters. In the heat of war
The hatred that was once a sore
Festered with a bitter lust,
Becomes a heartache, throbbing deep,
So that I cannot help but weep
Seeing comrades fall to dust."

Soldier,
Why that tear-wet eye?
Your fallen comrades you won't see again?
Remember, this affair is plain:
You may be about to die
Like them; but while you live, be strong,
For right will conquer all that's wrong.
Fight till they for mercy cry.

"You are right, my hatred's gone,
But I remember they are human too -
Those boys who in a sick world grew,
Groping - while afar, the dawn
Awaits to shine on them again
As it has on Freedom's men.
Can I , hating, speed the dawn?"

Soldier,
Spare no love for those
Who try to tear down what we want to save.
They're bestial, and they're not so brave.
Bring conflict to a quicker close:
Destroy their tanks, destroy their planes;
It is this Justice ordains.
Give them death if death they chose!

"I will wreck their tanks and planes
And let their cities fall, for all I care,
And in the name of right, I'll tear
Their bowels out, and smash their brains,
(For you, my country, killed my soul)
And as we approach the goal,
Clamp them in Revenge's chains!"

Soldier,
Bear it for a while,
And if you find no hatred for the foe,
Hate, then, the evil that brought woe.
Hate the greed and hate the guile.
Hate, then, the motive, not the man.
Love the Truth, for if you can,
Soldier, you have won God's smile.

From my Father's World War II Memoirs

From a series of poems by fellow soldiers that my father collected. The works' authorship is unknown.
A FLOWER GROWS ON WAR-SCARRED GROUND
(Munda Point)

On this island Mars still plays his hand.
The beach is quiet now; he has moved inland.
Beneath the sun, men toil;
Digging, clearing, piling soil on soil.
Between them and the sea - a fringe of sand.

On this fringe of sand Mars left his seal.
Here, craters deep abound: imprints of his heel
In some the sea has crept;
Others remain empty - all except
For flowers, growing there with quiet zeal.

A flower grows on a war-scarred ground
Amid man's shattered tools of war strewn around.
Amid war's after-gloom
It flourishes, hanging bloom on bloom.
How strange a home this zinnia has found!
It is not alone here on the beach;
Yonder springs - oh, if it could only reach! -
Another common flower,
Dainty, fragile, holding yet some power
To draw its strength from the reluctant beach.

Zinnia and petunia, hand in hand
In Mother's garden casually appearing
Now in this almost flowerless land
Become at once exotic, rare, endearing.

Final thoughts for 5764.

May you be blessed with prosperity, health, safety, freedom, wisdom, and good friends.

May the people of Iraq enjoy democracy and well-being in their land.

May the coming year see the liberation of the people of Iran.

May we find the strength and courage to stop the slaughter in Sudan.

May Israel know peace and security. May Israel see dialog between Jew and Arab, religious and secular. May the Jewish homeland live out its dream in safety. May Jewish children know that they have a home in the world.

May America live up to its true greatness and its dream of freedom, within its own borders and around the world.

May all have enough to eat and protection from heat, cold, and illness.

May the seeds of freedom spring up everywhere.

May we all learn to listen and understand one another better.

May we have the clarity to know good from evil, and the courage to choose good, even when it is difficult and dangerous. May we risk being unpopular when life has granted us a chance to speak out for freedom and justice.

May all creation know its own true higher nature, when G-d allows us to cast away the kingdom of evil from the land.

L' shanah tovah.

The Bad Thing (September 11 essay)

The following is what I wrote shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The Bad Thing

in memory of my father
Ken McLintock, 1919-2000

September 17, 2001.

Rosh Hashanah is upon us. Rosh Hashanah is more than the Jewish New Year: it is nothing less than the celebration of the creation of the universe.
My father passed away one year ago, at the end of Rosh Hashanah. And so, from now on, this day brings with it his yahrzeit, the anniversary of his passing. It is a strange juxtaposition: the creation of the universe, and my father’s death.
And it gets stranger still: this Rosh Hashanah also brings the shadow of war.
I remember a Vietnam-era Doonesbury cartoon I read as a kid. A couple of the characters were discussing how a Student Congress meeting had attempted to address the war issue. A motion had been introduced to pass a resolution condemning the Vietnam war; but as the debate wore on, the wording of the motion kept getting vaguer and vaguer. At last the Student Congress reached a consensus: they resolved simply, “War Is Bad.”
I’m reminded of this cartoon every time I see progressives trying to tackle the issue of war and peace. Yes, war is bad, and one can always make that statement without fear of contradiction. But contradiction is a part of war, as it is a part of life.
“Violence begets violence”; “If we respond with force, we just stoop to their level”: do we really believe that a military response is no different from flying a jetliner into an office building? Then we are all in trouble.
I am not speaking here of pacifists. They are used to dealing with such difficult issues, and while I don’t share their philosophy, I respect it. If you are going to oppose violence -- if your belief is that, above all, all violence is wrong -- then you have a great tradition of teachers to draw on, from the Buddha to George Fox. (Green Party doctrine endorses the principle of Nonviolence, while sensibly stopping short of advocating outright pacifism.) But this is a serious situation, and it deserves to be treated seriously; simplistic, holier-than-thou slogans accomplish nothing.
It bothers me that some people’s sense of justice is offended by the prospect of a military retaliation for the attack, but not by the attack itself. People who say -- while trying to sound as if they’re not saying it -- that America deserved this horror. How many rationalizations can you make for a mass murder?
Sometimes we must go to war.
In simplest terms, the underlying wish of all warfare is to be able to push a button and “make the bad guys disappear”. Modern technological warfare fosters the illusion that this is actually possible. If you watched the war against Iraq on CNN, you saw America and its allies trying to make that wish come true.
My father fought the Japanese in World War II. To the end of his days, the contradictions of that war troubled him. He spoke bitterly of the rampant racism in the American ranks, not only toward the enemy but also toward African-American servicemen and toward our Pacific Islander allies. He recalled seeing his first enemy casualty -- “He was just a kid, our snipers had got him.” The 37th Infantry Division yearbook, which now sits atop my desk as I write this, chronicles his unit’s progress from Fiji to the Solomon Islands to the Philippines. It also records the attitudes of the Americans towards the Japanese people; my father never showed the book.
A lifelong Democrat (he voted for Nader in ’96), he admired the idealism of the New Deal but could not bring himself to admire the president who signed Executive Order 9066. Demonizing the enemy, my father used to say, is a sign that society is in decline.
Hiroshima was a thorn in his side. He recalled an article shown to him by a buddy, in a science magazine shipped from home, describing a terrible new bomb which, when perfected, would devastate the enemy. Dad said he had hoped it was science fiction; he was wrong.
Once he tried to describe the feelings close to the battle front. “The looks on the faces of those guys coming back from the front lines,” he said, shaking his head. He looked off into space, trying to find the words to express it. Finally words failed him, and he waved his hands helplessly. “It’s just a bad thing,” was all he said.
During a certain period of seven months in 1990 and 1991, I experienced some inkling of the things my father must have felt. We were facing a great and intractable army, and all sorts of new weapons were being brought in against them. Among these was a bomb called a “fuel-air explosive”; picture holding a lighted match over an open can of gasoline, then magnify that picture to the size of a football stadium, and you get the idea. And there were the massive bombs dropped on the Iraqi bunkers, burying thousands of men alive. And finally there was General Powell’s order to “cut it off and kill it”, ending the war with a massacre of retreating soldiers.
My own weapon of choice (the Marine Corps’ choice, not mine) was the TOW missile. You located the target (typically a tank) in the eyepiece, pushed the button, and tracked the target until the missile reached it. Push the button, and make the bad guys disappear.

*

I remember Sgt. James, our vehicle commander -- he would later lose his post -- coming back from the commander’s tent with tears streaming from his eyes. “Schroeder’s dead,” he said, “and Snyder...” and he gave the rest of the names. They were killed at Khafji, but not by the enemy. Their vehicle had wandered into the path of a friendly missile and had been destroyed.
We lost more men to an accident, when one of the drivers fell asleep on a long night drive. More stupid, meaningless deaths with no one to blame.
Then there was the guy who got promoted for falling asleep on watch. You always have to have someone awake at might, and the combat crew works out a shift schedule with each man waking the next in turn after a shift of an hour or two. The CO’s orders were that two men out of each four-man crew must be awake at all times. But Sgt. James had other ideas: he figured as long as one of our guys was awake at each shift, it would be OK and no one would be the wiser. So we followed his plan, and sure enough, the last guy on watch fell asleep -- Cpl. Carlos, Sgt. James’s second-in-command. When the CO found out what had happened, and learned that Sgt. James had given the one-man-awake order, he fired Sgt. James from his post. Cpl. Carlos took over as crew commander.
Carlos led the crew capably throughout the ground war, and was both liked and respected. Later he got kicked out of the service for being gay. Can it get any stupider?
Does it make a difference how you die? Or how your friend dies?
To a soldier, it does. Being killed or wounded by the enemy is one thing; being killed or wounded by friendly fire, or in an accident, is very different. It is a loss without meaning.

*

Every generation sheds its own blood to build the world that its children will inherit.
The two towers of the World Trade Center are destroyed, and more than three thousand people have died. Rich and poor died together. Now there is a question before us: What kind of lives will we give our children, and what kind of structures will we build?


*

“Don’t seek revenge” -- this is the most telling phrase from the well-meaning sloganeers. Very well; but what about justice?
Justice is a hard concept, and it involves making difficult choices and distinctions. But there can be no mercy without justice; and as Palestinian advocates are continually reminding us, without justice there can be no peace.
One of the distinctions we must make is the distinction between legitimate anger and indiscriminate violence. Nothing justifies the murder of thousands of innocent civilians. Anyone who fails to unequivocally and unambiguously condemn this act is only supporting such violence. And using the bombing as an object-lesson to advance any goal, no matter how worthy, comes dangerously close to supporting it.
Making distinctions: this is the tough process that is called for now. It goes against our training, even our nature. Tribalism is easy: us and them. Unlearning tribalism is one of the hardest things we do in life, and one of the most important.

*

The February 22, 2001 issue of the Daily Journal of Commerce reports: “Neighbors oppose proposed Bellevue mosque.” It seems the Muslim community of Bellevue, Washington, just can’t get it right: the mosque “simply doesn’t fit in”, according to local residents, and it’s “too big for a residential area” which includes two churches, one school and a golf course.
These complaints would have sounded familiar to my father, who, with other members of his congregation, spent many frustrating months trying to get permission to build a new synagogue in suburban Connecticut. Like the Washington congregation, my father’s meeting-place was overcrowded and lacked adequate parking facilities. And the neighbors, like the good folks in Washington, had their own list of perfectly reasonable objections: it would be too noisy; there would be too much traffic; it would interfere with the local wildlife; and, oh yes, it just wouldn’t quite fit in.
According the Bellevue city planning manager, “It’s the nature of the facility. If I were living there, and there was going to be a mosque in my backyard, I’d panic because I’m familiar with a Baptist church, a Catholic church. But a mosque?”
The official’s candor is refreshing. No one in Connecticut would have been so indelicate as to bring up religion. That would have been gauche. There are ways to do these things.

*

A young Jewish radical once said, “Love your enemy.”
I am not an authority on the Christian scriptures, so it is presumptuous of me to interpret this verse. But perhaps the teacher is calling upon us to embrace this contradiction: Love your enemy -- he is your neighbor, whom you are bidden by the Law of Moses to love; love him, even while he is still your enemy.
My own tradition is also skeptical of simple answers. It affirms that the Living God sometimes speaks in many voices; and that harmony rests in the elusive balance of logic and insight, justice and mercy, action and restraint. It understands, too, that the love of humankind is a concept simple enough to be understood while standing on one foot -- and that you must spend the rest of your life studying its implications.
For Osama bin Laden, war is a simple matter. The bad guys are everywhere, and getting rid of them is merely a question of resources and tactics. For the rest of us, it is different: the task of finding the enemy, identifying him, and destroying him, will be difficult and costly. Our laser-guided bombs will be of only limited value. It will be a back-to-basics war.
We will learn, one slow step at a time, who and what we are fighting. And perhaps, in the process, we will discover who we are.

*

War is a bad thing. But we must do this bad thing, and we must do it the hard way. American soldiers will travel to another country, where, along with soldiers from other lands, they will kill and die. Those who live will come back with memories.
An old proverb says, “The ones who know, don’t talk. The ones who talk, don’t know.” The ones who come back will know. They will know that the line between good and evil sometimes hides in the shadows. They will know that the bad people will never disappear. They will know that the pursuit of justice is harder than the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and infinitely longer, and that it matters more than anything. And they will know things that they will never tell, because how do you say it?
You can never say it all, even if you talk for a hundred years.

Ha'azinu

The weekly Torah readings are known in Hebrew by their opening words. This week's reading, Ha'azinu, consists of the Song of Moses, beginning at Deuteronomy 32:1.

My portion shall descend like rain, my words shall distill as dew. (Deut. 32:2)

Zelig Pliskin, quoting Rabbi Bunim of Parshischo, explains the passage: "Words of admonition are analogous to rain. When rain falls on trees and plants, growth is not noticeable immediately. It takes time for the rain to have an effect. So too with admonition." (Love Your Neighbor, p. 432.)

It's true: if you try to change someone's mind about something, chances are they won't change their position right away. It's human nature that we don't like to be seen as easily swayed - and in general, that's a good thing. People like to feel they're making up their own minds. Moses was one of the greatest teachers in history; but as even a cursory reading of the Torah tells us, his "students" were not always the best learners!

All of us are "stiff-necked" at one time or another. Many of us have had our worldview radically altered over the last few years - and for most of us, this didn't happen overnight. The Torah is reminding us that even when our neighbors seem to be a bit "slow on the uptake", we should be patient with them and not give up.

L'Shanah Tovah!

New Year's greetings on the eve of Rosh haShanah 5765.

(Golly, is it 5765 already?!?)

Special thanks to my very good friend Gila from the shul, for her stimulating conversation and inspiration. Gila, I'm truly moved by your passion for justice and your beautiful spirit. And thanks for those photos and links you sent! I will post them as soon as I get a chance.

May the coming year be "a finish and end to all our troubles, and a start and beginning for our redemption." Keyn yehi ratzon.

BULLETIN: Alaa's Relative Kidnapped

Alaa of The Mesopotamian has just reported that a relative of his has been kidnapped for ransom. This is terrible news. We all pray for Alaa's family and the safe and speedy return of the victim. May all violence in Iraq end soon.

Pajama Warriors

So now we know what the big media think of us.

No, I don't mean we know what they think of bloggers - that part was clear long ago. I mean we know what they think of ALL of us - their potential audience - with their casual dismissal of citizen-journalists.

Jonathan Klein's contempt for the "guy sitting in his living room in pajamas" is at the very root of the problems CBS is facing right now. Have you ever watched CBS News or 60 Minutes in your PJs? Then he's talking about you. You - the citizen, the TV watcher, the consumer, the one who pays their bills - you are the poor shmoe sitting at home in your pajamas. You, my friend, have no checks and balances. Your voice does not count. You are nothing.

Thank you, Jonathan Klein, for this moment of illumination. Thank you for showing us that you don't respect us in the morning, or at any other time.

Now it's time for us to wake up.

Rathergate

I don't have much to add to the forged memo scandal that hasn't been said already. I'm willing to believe the Defense Department may have access to some advanced technology ... so did they have a time machine in 1972 for importing advanced technology from the future? Somehow I doubt it.

The amazing thing about the fake memos is just how bad the forgeries are. Really, it's hardly accurate to even call them "forgeries" ... they're more like Monopoly money. We can only figure that they were done by someone too young to have ever seen a typewriter, and who had no concept of how the thing works. Folks who've grown up with computers may not realize just how profoundly the experience of typing differs from composing on a computer. A typewriter is basically a mechanical device for printing letters on a piece of paper; many of the functions we take for granted on a computer are PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE on a typewriter.

(For example: word wrap and proportional spacing. A typewriter gives you a fixed number of character spaces per line - say, 80 spaces - and when you run out of spaces, the machine simply STOPS. To prevent ending a line in the middle of a word, you listen for the little bell that goes "ding!" when you're about five spaces from the end. At that point you decide whether you have enough spaces left to finish the word, or whether you need to hyphenate - that's why dic*tion*ar*ies have words broken up by syllables. Then you hit "carriage return" - or pull the lever on a manual model - to start a new line. If you have to go past the end of the line, you can hit "margin release" but then the product looks sloppy.)

The MSM could salvage some of their credibility by distancing themselves from this sorry joke, but they're not. They simply don't know what to do. The events of this past week have changed the media forever - and no time machine will be able to take us back.

Let's blogroll!

Kerry on Vietnam. Go check out "Kerry vs. O'Neill" at Armies of Liberation to find out what John F. Kerry actually said in 1971.

What if? LaShawn Barber in on a roll with the implications of a Kerry presidency - chas v'chalila!

"Possibly the finest paragraph ever written on the internet." That was one commenter's appraisal of this post at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler:

Their fear of religion had them supporting a brutal fundamentalist theocracy; their demand for sexual equality had them supporting a country where women were horsewhipped for showing ankle; their horror at genocide had them supporting a man who ran death camps to meet the mass grave quotas; their disgust for soldiers had them support a country that was little more than an army ruling over the captive breeding stock that refilled the ranks ...

Go read the whole thing at the link.

A tribute to the pajama-clad armies may be found at Kesher Talk. So go already!