Author: rakemag

Poor Michele Bachmann. Put upon again and again by the twin evils of gays and liberals. Thanks be to God she has Katherine Kersten to stick up for her.

Now let’s put aside the easy target of Kersten herself (and the Star Tribune, who gives such a right wing lapdog a column,) and talk about tolerance. Indeed, let’s look at what Kersten says Bachmann is being besieged about: her introduction of two bills to prohibit gay marriage and to “protect students from ideological bias at public universities.”

We may as well get the most damning thing Bachmann said (quoted by Kersten,) out there, too: “Judges have decided that legislators are good enough to decide issues like the load limits on turnip trucks. But they seem to believe that elected representatives can’t be trusted to determine the people’s will on big issues, such as marriage, abortion and the like.”

Gee, where would judges get that impression?

Maybe from legislators who want to impose their religion-based morality on the minority? You know, the founders suspected that might just happen when the legislature is elected by a religion-dominated majority. That’s why they tacked the Bill of Rights onto the Constitution, and stuck that damn First Amendment in there that gives religion-addled legislators so much trouble when they want to tell the rest of us whom we can marry or what we can say if we happen to be university professors.

Maybe Bachmann and Kersten ought to stick to the turnip truck legislation. That seems to be what they fell off of when it comes to understanding that the supreme law of the land does not support the “will of the people” when those willful people are bent on intolerance of gay or liberal minorities.

Ok, this is one of those times when a press release actually came to our office and didn’t go into the junk mail folder. It seems the local radio arm of Clear Channel, those whipping boys of the alternative press, are giving $93,000 this week to the School Arts Project to provide funding for music, art and theater programs in the Minneapolis and St. Paul Public Schools…you know, those programs which don’t help train people to be Wal-Mart checkers and so don’t qualify for actual funding by the state.

Add this to the $25,000 they gave last fall as an emergency gift to KBEM, the Minneapolis Schools’ jazz station, when that station lost its state funding. And then throw in a few million they’ve raised for other Minnesota charities over the years with their Sampler CDs on Cities 97, and maybe you’ll want to ask yourself if they don’t deserve a little notice for that.

Now, if they’ll just get Kenny G off their jazz station…

My cousin was in the Army, stationed in Germany during the cold war. His duty for a while was commanding an anti-aircraft battery. He described it like this: “I commanded a $58 million missile launching system. I had a lifer sergeant, who really knew his stuff, but the men who actually had to aim and fire this intricate computer guided system were a bunch of high-school drop outs who never really learned how to operate the system. I figured if the Russian air force attacked, we could get the thing calibrated and get off a shot about the time the planes were over Paris. My only consolation was that I knew that there was a Russian commander a few miles to my east who had exactly the same problems.”

So, I wasn’t surprised when I saw this story in Slate. It notes, as many other stories have done lately, that recruiters are having a tough time filling their quotas for the Army and Marines. The Slate piece even reveals that we’re keeping undesirable soldiers in the military, in order to keep up the fiction that we have enough troops, when the commanders who have to deal with these bad soldiers would rather muster them out.

The Slate piece puts forth some really good ideas about how to address the problem of declining recruitment without resorting to keeping bad soldiers. It also points out one of the idiocies of the current “privatization” of military functions…the unintended consequence of bad military policy of the current administration. I became personally aware of this when a retired Marine friend of mine told me he’d been offered four times his Marine salary to lead what amounts to a private Marine rifle squad in Iraq.

“Who would be in this squad?” I asked. His reply, “Guys like me; guys we spent millions to train to be the best fighing men in the world, then pay them like crap and starve their families while they’re on deployment overseas.”

And, it seems, make them serve with guys who’ll get them killed, just so we can say we’ve got enough boots on the ground.

By the way, today is the 61st anniversary of D-day. Thank a veteran, particulary a WW II vet, today.

A friend of mine told me over the weekend that she missed my poetry posts. (If you are nostalgic, you can go back to any posts from April for the pedantry.) But that comment, and today’s news from Iraq made me think of one of my favorites: Horace’s Ode 3.2–the famous “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” ode–“It is sweet and fitting to die for your country.”

Now I’m certain that Horace was being ironic. In fact, I wrote a pretty good paper about it once in college. But, of course, that hasn’t stopped the guys who start the wars quoting him out of context for the last 2000 years. We have, luckily, the other poets and artists to interpret for us.

Here’s Hemingway’s take, for example: “They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

And here is English poet Wilfred Owen:

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime —
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Read that last line again–the part about the “old Lie,” and think of how we got into Iraq. Think of that in the light of the stories out of England recently in which it was revealed in Parliamentary memos that the American government knew damn well they were lying about Saddam’s weapons.

Add that to the lies Rumsfeld baldly told to the questioning American soldier about why they were sent to Iraq with unarmored Humvees and inadequate body armor.

Think then of Horace and Hemingway and Owen’s imagery.

Five Americans were killed over the weekend, four of them by road side bombs that blew apart their bodies, which were shielded by little more than the leather armor worn by Roman soldiers in Horace’s time.

Think of the pink froth of those boys’ last breaths gurgling from their perforated chests and screaming lips.

And then think if you would send a dog to die like that.

Rumsfeld would.

There’s another article in today’s Miami Herald about Luis Posada Carriles. (Search their archives for a long list of more stories on this jerk.) Here’s the basic deal: Posada blew up a Cuban airliner that was on its way to Venezuela. He blew up some hotels in Havana. He tortured leftist prisoners in Venezuela.

Even putting aside the torture thing, which is wholeheartedly endorsed by the Bush administration, the airplane and hotel bombings kind of make him a terrorist, don’t they? Of course, there is the annoying mitigating circumstance that Posada was working for (gasp) the CIA at the time of the airplane bombing, but U.S. law clearly prohibits offering asylum to terrorists.

But, there’s also the law of South Florida, particularly Miami, which is, for all practical purposes, the Batista government of Cuba in exile. So, if Jeb-boy is gonna carry Florida in 2008, brother W probably ain’t gonna send a Cuban “freedom fighter” to Castro’s buddies in Venezuela to be tried.

Gee, even Libya turned over the Lockerbie bombers. (Of course, in Gaddifi’s defense, he didn’t have to worry about elections.) But, if Libya was once a charter member of the Axis of Evil club, what does that make us?