I'm sitting in the airport, leaving for LA in about an hour. I'm excited and nervous. Excited because I've never been to California, and nervous because I'm attending a dinner meeting thing with some cool, high-powered industry people. I'd like to make an impression beyond "some fat yokel". Although, you know, I'll take that if I have to.
I talked to Kerry on my way to the airport, and he's crazy busy with his book promotion tour. He did twenty-eight interviews and radio show phone-ins yesterday. I suspect that's a nice problem to have. He sounds exhausted and a little flustered, but to be honest, he also sounds happy. Good for him.
As for me, I'm happy to be getting out of town for a few days.
That's it. What, you were waiting for something meaningful?
Um, okay, a quick political observation. In recent weeks, both Barack Obama and John McCain have referred to the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq as a "waste", and both have quickly backtracked when patriotic eyebrows began wiggling menacingly across this great land.
Two candidates for the presidency are soooooooooo close to showing the courage to speak the truth about the war, but in the end, both hedged. I am both heartened and disgusted. As for the Democratic Party, which called on McCain to apologize for using the term mere weeks after Obama did the exact same thing, WTF? Knee-jerk, safe politics are going to serve you exactly as well in the next presidential election as they did in the last two. Show us something better, if you can. Some integrity and ideological consistency might be a good place to start.
I watched the Bob Woodruff story on traumatic brain injuries last week, and it rejuvenated all my anti-war feelings in a way that I hadn't felt in a long time. I don't think I'm going to be able to vote for anyone of either party who has supported this war, certainly not within the past two years or so. That narrows my choice of candidates considerably, at least as the field stands now. Who knows what will happen in the coming months?
Wouldn't it be funny, after my notorious Nader "Green Days of Shame" of 2000, if I ended up voting for Al Gore?
Okay, time to fly. See you when I get to the land of the Beautiful People. I assume I will feel like Jabba the Hutt the whole time.
On anti-war feelings... I just watched the documentary movie "Murderball" about the US quadraplegic rugby team, and in one scene, there's a guy talking to another bunch of quadraplegics about the game. I thought he was talking to disabled highschool students , but no, he was talking to Iraq war "veterans" who all were wheelchair bound. I was absolutely stunned. I'm sorry, I'm not even American, but "waste" seems pretty appropriate to me. Have fun in California, you deserve it.
ReplyDeleteYou're not just some fat yokel, you're Some Fat Yokel with capitalization.
ReplyDeleteRob,
ReplyDeleteThis is going to be so cool for you. LA rocks, and it has a sucky side or two or three even; but I really hope it lives up to your vision. It's kind of a love it or hate it city. I hope when you do your book tour that you do some in SoCal so I can get a signed copy!! Hope your plane trip is a breeze, and with any luck you aren't flying into LAX!! Take some great pictures!!
On LA, after six hours:
ReplyDeleteGood: People have been super nice, like beyond Texas nice. A girl whom I had never met in my life and who had no idea if I was a crazy killer yokel gave me a ride to my hotel in her biodiesel VW Bug today. It was super nice, and I am totally sold on the car now. I want to save the planet. Don't say thanks or anything.
Bad: My cab ride from LAX to Hollywood? SEVENTY DOLLARS. No shit. Actual real American dollars.
Rob, have a great time in LA, but EVEN MORE IMPORTANT...you're on CUTE OVERLOAD!
ReplyDeleteI am a liberal, anti-this war and loathe GWB.
ReplyDeleteAs the spouse of a Marine who did two tours in Iraq, I also take great offense at the word "waste" in this context.
It shows a great deal of ignorance about why individuals go to war.
It's very easy for people outside of this to forget that "the troops" are actually composed of complex individuals.
To label every death under any one word is to depersonalize the individual. Which is the very thing that makes it so easy to send them to war.
I could go on about this for a long, long time. But I hope that the little I have shared at least makes people think about the individuals under the uniform.
I promise you, we Californians don't bite.
ReplyDeleteWell, not much anyway. Have a great trip!
Hmmm...I thought I posted a message here before, but I must have screwed it up or I can't see it (the computer and I are not good friends.) So, if this is the second one, I apologize.
ReplyDeleteAs a liberal and someone who loathes GWB, I take offense at the term "waste" in this context.
There is no such person as "the troops." When the complex individuals who make up the armed forces are referred to that way, it depersonalizes them. That depersonalization is a large part what makes it so easy for some to send them to war in the first place.
No one can speak for the thousands dead and the thousands more wounded who does not ask them or the people who knew them best. I don't care if it's GWB telling us that all their deaths were for glory or one of my own people saying it was a waste.
To do so is to rob them of their own right to do so, it's grouping them together as a prop to make a point. They deserve better than that.
My Marine spouse did two tours in Iraq. We were very lucky, he came home. Why he went, what his death would have meant, are personal and complex. Please do no assume to know better than him what his own lifes work means.
Rob,
ReplyDeleteFlying in to Burbank probably would have cost a little more for the initial ticket, but saved you that much and more on cab fare. Sometimes Burbank gets pretty decent specials on flights too. Remember that when you fly out here to do a book tour!! You picked a beautiful day to arrive in LA, not too hot, a little wind and not nearly as smoggy as usual. Hope you are having a blast!
Your hamster is famous on Cute Overload! I remember that video back on Darn Tootin.
ReplyDeleteVote for Al. Seriously. He'll announce sometime in ... what is this, February? Probably before Christmas, after Hillary implodes following the eleventy-teenth question about moving The First Playah back into the Whie House. And then Al will pick Obama as his running mate and they'll figure out a way to end the war(s) and our veterans will be taken care of and we'll all be so happy tra la.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, if you'd like to make a direct difference for the troops, visit Operation Helmet. Give them the equipment that our tax dollars should have already paid for so they can come home again.
And also by the way, Rob, the great ham escape ("bim bam boom") is on Cute Overload, but you prolly already knew that. Woot! Teh Qte!
Sugar-free Peep-covered kisses from Tennessee!
I appreciate your comments. But there is one indisputable fact about why soldiers go to war, and why they fight.
ReplyDeleteThey do it because they are ordered to. Plain and simple, nothing more or less complicated than that. Their reasons may be many and varied, but no soldier makes the decision whether or not to go to war, only whether or not to be come a soldier.
It is that much more important, therefore, that the powers that control their destinies do so in a way that does not, yes, waste the lives of the men and women who have to trust that their leaders are not playing trivially with their lives.
Because I'm not making assumptions as to why any of them go to war. They go because they are ordered to go. If you support the troops, you do so only by holding our leaders responsible for their actions, and the consequences those actions have. Soldiers' "rights" have literally nothing to do with it.
I recommend reading Wilfred Owen, a soldier poet from World War I. He writes movingly of the soldier as a victim of war, and he's absolutely right.
My son is in the Navy. While he is on sea-duty, he is relatively safe on a ship. When he is on shore duty, the armed services powers-that-be are free to send him into a war as a ground troop. I cannot, in my wildest dreams, imagine my son toting a rifle through the streets of Baghdad and then killing someone. He personifies "live and let live."
ReplyDeleteIf he was killed in action in a stupid war that stands for NOTHING, I would be devastated beyond belief. WASTE does not begin to define what would happen were he to die. It would be a tragedy, dying for nothing. America is at war because we invaded a country that had done nothing to us, other than its dictator insulting the Bush family. If we really wanted to fight a war on terror, weren't 17 of the 19 highjackers on 9-11 from Saudi Arabia? When was there ever talk of invading them? Oh, that's right; the Saudis and the Bushes are big buds. Have you seen the photos of them arm-in-arm?
My son chose to join the Navy and the experience has been a good one for him. It literally saved his life, a life that is now full of promise.
And yes, he has served 4 months in the Persian Gulf where they were flying bombing missions off his aircraft carrier, and last summer he spent three months off the coast of Beirut along side the USS Cole, escorting cruise ships full of fleeing Americans. He's been on "active duty" in two war zones so don't tell me I don't know the terror of a mother concerned for the life of her son.
It haunts me every day.
Let us elect a president who can tell it like it is, who is unafraid of the political fallout of stating the truth. Enough of the liars, profiteers, and torturers who occupy the current White House. They are a disgrace to our nation.
Ditto, Rob, on all of it -- the war, the election, the candidates, the soldiers, Bob Woodruff's special. I've been thinking a lot about all the amputees and PTSD-ridden soldiers who will be and have been returning to this country, but I hadn't thought much about the other types of injuries, such as those shown in Bob's special. It scares me and it makes me sick that these lives, too, will never, ever be the same. God, I hope the V.A. hospitals can and will do what we need them to do for the injured. Sadly, they seem only slightly more capable than FEMA was after Katrina.
ReplyDeleterob, you missed my point entirely.
ReplyDeleteYou're insisting that their deaths are solely defined by the order to war, which is something both consertives and liberals do. "Waste" vs. "glory."
Please at least consider why that is offensive to some veterans and their families, even some of the wildly liberal among them.
Let the dead decide what their death meant, let their loved ones decide. A mother who believes her childs death was a waste is just as right as a mother who think her child's death was for a worthy cause.
Deciding for other people what their lives and deaths mean by lumping them all together in a group is easy to do. We do it all the to all sorts of people. That is it so easy to do should be a warning that it is probably also wrong.
FHT
PS I've read Owen's poems. I'm willing to wager I've read a lot more than the average person about war, diplomacy and history. It's not a theory to me.
I don't mean this to sound obnoxious, but I don't actually care if someone is offended by my opinion of the war or the senseless waste of human life that has resulted. I can't own the feelings of others. I'm not responsible for making sure that the toes of others remain safely untrod by my opinions.
ReplyDeleteThe fact is, I do believe that the deaths of soldiers in a senseless war is a waste of those lives. If the families of dead soldiers hold a different opinion and can find some measure of value in the sacrifice of their loved ones in this war, then good for them. I understand why they need to do that.
But from where I'm standing it looks like desperation, like a coping mechanism to avoid facing a harsh reality: someone sent their sons and daughters and fathers and mothers into war without a legitimate reason, without a plan for keeping the peace and rebuilding the country, and without the slightest respect for the value of those lives.
I understand what you mean when you say that the families of the dead should be left to decide the value of their deaths. But the reality is that those soldiers represent a democratic society, governed in theory at least by its citizens. Their actions and their deaths affect every one of us. And as members of the human race and children of God, the fate of every person who dies in this war, soldier or civilian, is the responsibility of every living person.
To silence our opinions out of some idea of respecting the feelings of the families of the dead sounds like the right thing to do. But for someone who truly believes that the dead of this war have been sacrificed for nothing, keeping our silence is as wrong a thing as we can do.
Yes, you do sound obnoxious when you claim not to care that you've added to the suffering of the grieving. Your attempt to elevate your lack of compassion to an ethical must falls flat.
ReplyDeleteEspecially when you claim that the opinion of the ones who actually knew and loved these people is driven by "...desperation, like a coping mechanism to avoid facing a harsh reality..."
So now your opinion is "reality?" Not only do you know the truth of the dead, you know the motives of the grieved. Hubris!
Who is facing this harsh reality? You? By quoting a poet from WWI? By blogging?
Avoiding this harsh reality is not an option for us. It never has been. I cannot ignore these people because I am the daughter and spouse of Veterans. I count among my closest friends veterans and widows.
Believe it or not, they don't need you or GWB or anyone else to tell them what language reflects "reality" or what their motiviations are.
You surely know that life goes on and changes in unpredictable ways, yet every death comes down to one triggering event that happened years ago. The Kurds my spouse served with certainly do not think this is a waste. They believe that even if the reasons for going in were false, good has come of it. But you don't want to hear their words, I am sure.
Based on your words, I'm also sure you'll continue to insist that you know the "reality" of the deaths of people you never knew, whose lives you clearly don't understand.
You feel the moral high ground is to remain entrenched in this disgusting tug-of-war over the dead (glory! waste! glory! waste!)
I see nothing ethical about that.
*I'VE* added to the suffering of the grieving? And you're *SURE* you know what I think, based on my differing opinion? If you don't understand what I'm saying, then I can't imagine how you think you know what I'm thinking.
ReplyDeleteYeah. This just left the realm of the rational. The straw man you're setting up now is like a straw King Kong. I wouldn't know where to begin even if I felt inclined to argue any of the points that you think I'm making.
You want to think I'm an asshole because my belief differs from yours and because I don't accept your soldier's wife opinion as sacrosanct? That's fine. But being an asshole doesn't make me wrong, and all your hyperbole about my damage to the delicate psyches of military families doesn't make it true, or even make it make a bit of sense.
You want to discuss this further? Fine. Then dial the rhetoric down a few notches and show a little respect for that quintessentially American activity: free exchange of ideas.
Best of luck with your husband, I hope he stays safe.