Comrades

Today is Veterans Day in the United States, a day set aside for honoring the men and women who serve or have served in the uniformed services in defense of the nation.

The holiday dates back to the end of the 1914-1918 war; 11 November 1918 was the day the Armistice went into effect in Europe, silencing the guns of what was called the Great War. (More than 20 years later, we realized we’d have to start numbering these conflicts and renamed it World War I.) And this year marks the centenary of the establishment of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, as the remains of an unidentified American soldier were interred at that beautiful spot overlooking the nexus of national government.

Since then, he’s been joined by comrades from World War II, Korea and Vietnam. I think we’ve improved our identification technology such that no one killed in the service of his or her country is now “unknown”. An advancement, I suppose.

The focus of today is meant to be on the living; we have Memorial Day for those who gave all, but there is crossover. There’ll be a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown with the President, and other commemorations around the country and the world.

My company has a good percentage of veterans in it, and I like that we honor them pretty much every day. There was tremendous company and individual outreach to people after the pullout from Afghanistan in August. More recently, one of my colleagues put out a call to help resettle a former interpreter and his family, who’d been turfed out of his home and country by the Taliban, and we rallied to the cause. No flag-waving or chest-thumping; just step up and get ‘er done.

That, to me, is the epitome of honoring those who serve. And I’m here for it.

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: the radiant star

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr., day in the United States. The third Monday in January has been a federal holiday since 1986; I suppose that’s another line item on the grievance list of White supremacists. Boo hoo.

In two days, we’ll kick Cadet Bonespurs out of the White House and Moscow Mitch will step down as Senate Majority Leader. This will take place in a city that is being patrolled by 20,000 National Guardsmen, as well as by District, Maryland and Virginia cops, armed and armored (unlike the US Capitol Police on the 6^th). Because the insurrectionists have vowed to return on Wednesday with their guns.

All 50 state capitals are also gearing up to defend against these whackjobs in this weirdest of codas to 2020. Because they’ve been threatened, too.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past week—I haven’t seen this kind of thing since, I guess, Belfast in 1994. And much of my thinking goes like this: we are facing this militarized presence to protect our government from domestic terrorists; seems to me like either way we go on this, we are completely fucked.

Well, but today is Gratitude Monday, so back to King. In March of 1965, he was one of the thousands who marched from Selma to Montgomery; when they reached the Alabama capital, he gave an address that resonates with me particularly strongly today. He began:

“Last Sunday, more than eight thousand of us started on a mighty walk from Selma, Alabama. We have walked through desolate valleys and across the trying hills. We have walked on meandering highways and rested our bodies on rocky byways. Some of our faces are burned from the outpourings of the sweltering sun. Some have literally slept in the mud. We have been drenched by the rains. Our bodies are tired and our feet are somewhat sore.

“But today as I stand before you and think back over that great march, I can say, as Sister Pollard said—a seventy-year-old Negro woman who lived in this community during the bus boycott—and one day, she was asked while walking if she didn’t want to ride. And when she answered, ‘No,’ the person said, ‘Well, aren’t you tired?’ And with her ungrammatical profundity, she said, ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.’ And in a real sense this afternoon, we can say that our feet are tired, but our souls are rested.

“They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, ‘We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.’’

King enumerated continuing goals for marchers—segregated housing, segregated schools, poverty and ballot boxes. The latter are mentioned several times, because they are the keys that unlock all the rest. Then he served notice to all the White folks calling for the 1965 version of “unity” that the kind of unity they want—Black folks kept in their place—is not in the cards.

“The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all of God’s children. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that allows judgment to run down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy of brotherhood, the normalcy of true peace, the normalcy of justice.

“And so as we go away this afternoon, let us go away more than ever before committed to this struggle and committed to nonviolence. I must admit to you that there are still some difficult days ahead. We are still in for a season of suffering in many of the black belt counties of Alabama, many areas of Mississippi, many areas of Louisiana. I must admit to you that there are still jail cells waiting for us, and dark and difficult moments. But if we will go on with the faith that nonviolence and its power can transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows, we will be able to change all of these conditions.”

And here we get to the part that I take to heart:

“I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ Somebody’s asking, ‘How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?’ Somebody’s asking, ‘When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?’ Somebody’s asking, ‘When will the radiant star of hope be plunged against the nocturnal bosom of this lonely night, plucked from weary souls with chains of fear and the manacles of death? How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?’

“I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.’

“How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’

How long? Not long, because ‘you shall reap what you sow.’’

And this is what I’m holding on to today:

“How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

I am the most impatient person you will ever know. And seeing the events of the past four years distilled into the horrors of the past two weeks has sent me up the walls. I’m infuriated by 95-year-old Nazis claiming the infirmities of age as a defense against standing trial for war crimes. I have been flipping out at the pardons and medals handed out by Bonespurs like party favors. It took way, way too long for Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić to appear at The Hague. I want every damned MAGAt who showed up armed and maskless at any state capitol tried for attempted manslaughter. Having King remind me that—even if I do not live to see it—no lie lives forever and the arc of the moral universe will bend toward justice brings peace to my soul.

My soul needs that peace, and I am grateful for it today, this week and this year. We definitely have difficult days ahead of us and we have many miles to go. Let us all keep our eyes on truth and justice as we march.

 

Rewriting history

Back in the dim dark past, February used to have two federal holidays: the 12^th, honoring Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and the 22^nd, honoring George Washington’s. At some point, the feds rolled the two of them into the third Monday of the month and called it Presidents’ Day.

This year, that was yesterday, and I’m really grateful that we got the day off. I needed it. (I honored the two titans in the traditional way: I went to Costco, to stock up on butter and laundry detergent.)

Well, except apparently in the state that touts itself as the Mother of Presidents. At the end of last month I had occasion to visit the local branch of the Fairfax County (home to Washington, as it happens) Public Library, and noticed that they marked it thusly:

They even cut off Lincoln from Rushmore.

Sore losers.

My brush with stardom

I wasn’t much of a fan of the 1950s Hollywood movie stars. I think it’s because in those movies (which I mostly saw on Channel 9’s Million Dollar Movies) they seemed so far removed from any reality that touched me. There was no way that I could connect with them.

So when a Navy videographer friend of mine came into town one summer with his team for a project with Kirk Douglas, I though the invitation to shoot the production stills as more of a lark than anything else. (I love shooting those.)

The spot was part of what was called “Sitrep 30”—a half-hour of essentially newsreel-type news that was broadcast at Navy installations and on ships. The film The Final Countdown (about the supercarrier USS Nimitz being thrown back in time to December 1940 near the Hawaiian Islands; Douglas played the captain) had just been released, and the team’s commander had managed to wangle the star into a pro bono voiceover narration, with stand-ups for the beginning and the end.

I helped edit the script the night before, and on the day, we converged on the Helmsman statue at a small park in Marina Del Rey. We got set up and Douglas showed with his lawyer/manager—he was apparently on his way to evict a tenant from one of the condos he owned in the area.

Well, it was not a felicitous experience—Douglas kept flubbing his lines for the standups, so the commander had to quickly write up gigantic cue cards. Then the soundman kept having to re-record, what with the air horns from boats in the marina and take-offs and landings at nearby LAX. The actor was impatient with it all, so we did a bit of scrambling.

But eventually we got enough to go with, and I got to shoot about a gazillion frames. (I was loaded with two Nikons, one for black-and-white and one for color.) Here are a couple:

His obits said that he was active in the community, and a major factor in ending the Hollywood blacklist. Maybe he was just having a bad day. And so may his memory be a blessing.

Gratitude Monday: honoring service

At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the guns of the War to End All Wars fell silent. The survivors crawled out of their trenches, scraped caked mud off their uniforms and tried to understand how to live normal lives again.

Well—that was a pipe dream; societies always try to return to normal after cataclysms, but the fact is, “normal” is one of the first casualties of wartime service. Along with truth.

I thought a lot about that as I visited the military cemeteries of the Western Front—French, British, German, American. More than other graveyards, military cemeteries display the true democracy of death: the uniformity of the headstones; regular rows; whatever the rank, no one more elaborate than any other. But that’s the dead: the living (more or less) returned to their homes to find that their governments wanted them to resume their pre-war stations on pre-war terms, and their families wanted them to pretend they hadn’t been through what they had.

We still do that—send men and women out to do the worst things imaginable and then ignore the human consequences, pretending that being a sapper or a tanker is just like being a plumber or a marketer. The fact that our longest-war-ever is not even a national effort, the way the World Wars were, keeps the blood-and-treasure costs out of mind for most Americans. If you’re not serving or know someone who is, it’s easy to ignore the price of policy.

Well, it’s Veterans Day here in the US, one of two days that we pay lip service to the sacrifices made by those who serve in our defense. Who take their oaths to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and pay a steep price for it. I am grateful for all of them, all the generations of them. And I’m grateful to be working with many of them who continue their service by protecting our cybersecurity.

Gratitude Monday: workers in progress

I don’t know when, exactly, it became Received Wisdom that anyone whose income is derived from salary or wages instead of from investments is a chump. Possibly that started during the Reagan administration, but it certainly has achieved wide circulation in the past 20 years.

We see it all the time in the commoditization of labor in all forms, from bus boys to software engineers, who across the board put in work weeks that would have sent unions out howling on picket lines just 60 years ago. At the lower end, they work two or three jobs to earn a subsistence living; at the upper they risk being replaced by offshored equivalents if they don’t chalk up 60-hour weeks on a regular basis to meet ludicrous schedules.

And all along the way they are ridiculed and demonized as being, at heart, slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers. (If their skin pigmentation contains higher quantities of melanin, then the opprobrium is proportionately greater.) Because if they had any gumption at all, we’re told, they’d have either inherited some wealth, managed hedge funds for obscene fees, or come up with the Next Great Thing (“the Google/Uber/iPhone of [whatever]”) and sold it just after some overhyped IPO and moved on to something else.

In the Valley They Call Silicon, the big dogs all call themselves Serial Entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists fall all over themselves to throw money at them for their next big cookie-cutter thing. The people who do the actual building may or may not make a couple hundred large if they happen to be there when lightning strikes; but they can equally find themselves looking for another job if the serial entrepreneur in a neighboring building’s cookie-cutter thing goes IPO first.

(As for the people who clean the offices, deliver the snacks in the stocked kitchens and drive the corporate commuter buses—they’re all contractors, working for a series of interchangeable vendors with no concern for health, safety or proper accounting practices. The vendors don’t care who the contractors are; the client companies don’t care who the vendors are. All that matters is who’s going to cost the least.)

Because it’s all about the short-term big payoff, not about long-term growth. Only slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers think about long-term commitments; winners aim to take it all. Now.

This being Labor Day, the serial entrepreneurs, investment bankers and trust fund babies are doing whatever they do in their substantial cushion of comfort. The workers are marking the official end of summer, maybe barbecuing or hitting the retail sales. I’m thinking about the generations of men and women who literally put their lives, their subsistence (no fortunes for these folks) and their sacred honor on the line so that workers could receive fair wages for their labor, so that they could perform that labor under safe working conditions and so that they could build pension plans that meant they wouldn’t have to work literally to death.

These were radical notions 150 years ago—the very idea that sharing out some of the proceeds of productivity with its producers was just cray-cray. But those radical notions—and the radical men and women who fought for them—brought the United States to its zenith of innovation and prosperity. When the labor tide rose, so did everyone’s boat.

Sadly, that tide has receded. We are continually being told that American companies cannot compete in the world economy if they have to think about the welfare of their employees. In their minds (as always), welfare = unearned largesse, AKA the dole. No, every penny that doesn’t go to executive compensation must be pinched to the limit by longer hours, tighter budgets and lower taxes unless we want all those jobs manufacturing goods and providing remote services to go overseas. This current administration, comprising as it does Goldman Sachs execs, CEOs of oil companies and alt-reich racists and misogynists led by the Grifter-in-Chief screaming about turning back the tide of immigration, is only marginally more open about this kind of contempt than Republicans have been since little Newtie’s Contract with America.

. 

The fact that the Business Roundtable of Fortune 500 CEOs recently announced that it’s possible that corporations might owe the environment, the community and their employees more than a royal rogering is, so far, only talk. And last month at the Royal Dutch Shell plant in Pennsylvania, union workers were forced to choose between "attending" the Kleptocrat's speech or losing a day's work. A plant manager told reporters the company was treating it as a "training" event with the guest speaker being the orange buffoon. We have so much ground to recover.

I think we’ve hit a situation where a small percentage (say, one percent) of the people have been eying that goose that lays such beautiful golden eggs, and they’re convinced that there’s a simple way to release an immediate gush of gold shareholder value by applying this cleaver to its neck…

And I’m probably just being contrary when I say that I perceive something flawed in that strategy. But I do not see how an economy can grow if you strangle the buying power of those who actually build it.  

Thus, I am (as always) grateful to the people who fought for the value of labor in real life-and-death struggles for decades in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, and for those who continue that fight in these gig economy times. Mother Jones, Wobblies, resisters and all of you—thank you.

The flower of our youth

There’s a lot of coverage—rightly so—of the 75^th anniversary of the D-Day landings, that spectacular operation that drove a stake through the wall of Hitler’s Festung Europa and began the 11-month slog to Germany. The ranks of the veterans of Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah are thinning and growing frail; they are, after all, in their 90s.

There was a ceremony yesterday at Portsmouth, one of the embarkation points in England, to mark that side of the operation, and there’s another one today at Juno Beach, near Courseulles-sur-Mer, one of the two British landing sites. Most of the heads of state understand the solemnity and importance of remembering these long-ago events; sadly, the one representing the United States does not.

I don’t know what’s on the agenda, but it would be a good thing if the pols visited one of the three military cemeteries within a few kilometers of one another near Omaha Beach: Colleville-sur-mer, American; Bayeux, British; and La Cambe, German. I’ve walked them all, several times.

The American cemetery is situated on the bluff above Omaha Beach. You can stand at the edge and look down on the scene of the slaughter. And wonder how the hell they ever made it up to where you are. The graves are marked with white marble crosses, with the occasional Star of David interspersed. It’s quiet, usually, except for the wind. More than 9300 men lie there—not all fallen at Normandy, but congregated there in the fellowship of death.

The British cemetery, run by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, is in the heart of Bayeux, the town they took on 7 June. The headstones are like those at all CWGC graveyards—identically-sized slabs of white marble engraved with the soldier’s name, regiment and date of death (if known; otherwise a cross and “known but to God” inscribed); a centrally-located Cross of Sacrifice (tall marble cross with a sword inset), and a Stone of Remembrance, inscribed “Their Name Liveth Forevermore”. More than 4000 Brits, Commonwealth, Poles, French and others lie there.

La Cambe is outside Bayeux; you get to it down a quiet road that seems to have no other purpose but to lead you to the dead. The cemetery is maintained by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the German counterpart to the CWGC. It’s not as large space-wise as the two Allied graveyards. That’s because when you look at the inscriptions on the black metal markers set into the earth, you see there are often two to five men buried in a single spot. Plus, there are the nearly 300 known and unknown under the central mound. More than 21,000 men lie there.

The thing that struck me almost from the first in these three cemeteries was the ages on the markers—you almost never see anyone who’d reached 24. Most were in the 19-22-year age range. When you’d expect them to be in college, or working their first jobs.

I’ve often wondered what the world lost through those early deaths. What music never was composed? What scientific breakthroughs never made? What civic gains, feats of sportsmanship, family enrichment just disappeared from the future in June 1944?

That, of course, is in addition to the anguish and sorrow that engulfed their families. Parents, siblings, wives, children—bereft and left alone to sort out a world gone mad. No one to repair the gutter or fix the bike; to guide a grandchild’s hands tying a bow knot; to comfort a friend; to surprise a lover with flowers.

It had to be done—it always seems to need doing. Especially since we see the resurgence of fascism and totalitarianism all around us. But take a few moments this week to think on those 30,000 lives cut short in Normandy 75 years ago. The boys of D-Day who put their lives on the line for their generation and those that followed.

Gratitude Monday: On duty

Last Thursday afternoon in the District They Call Columbia, we had a tornado warning. Our COO sent round an email telling everyone to get away from outside windows, which is probably good advice, because I’d have been the one glued to a window, shooting photos. As it happens, I was WFH in the People’s Republic, where it got so dark around 1530 that my solar-powered garden butterfly lights came on. Sometime after that, the skies opened up and all the water in the world came right down on us.

(A few weeks ago a tornado actually touched down about a mile from me, although thankfully there was no loss of life.)

Well, during a staged event that afternoon for yet another farm bailout to offset the fallout from his tariff wars, as the Chaos Monkey was peddling porkies about him being calm—the calmest ever, dammit—when throwing a wobbly at Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer the day before, and was calling on his toady aides to—one by one—swear to the assembled media that his account of the encounter was true, and calm…soldiers of The Old Guard were carrying out their duty at the Tomb of the Unknowns across the river at Arlington National Cemetery. Including placing flags at the Tomb in honor of Memorial Day.

And on Friday morning, as Cadet Bonespurs (proud descendant of a long line of military service dodgers) hauled off for a state visit to Japan and golfing with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, The Old Guard tweeted photos of what real devotion to duty looks like. Viz:

Today I am grateful for the generations of men and women of our armed services who have made great sacrifices for the survival of our nation and our democracy. And I’m grateful for The Old Guard for their dedication to honoring those sacrifices. And I’m grateful for social media, which enabled America’s Regiment to disseminate these photos that silently remind us of what duty looks like.

Let them eat...

Throughout the day yesterday, I checked Twitter for tweets about International Women’s Day. There was quite a range, including one that led me to this great story about the temporary addition of the bronze statue of a little girl defiantly facing down the Wall Street charging bull—funded by an asset management firm committed to adding more women to corporate boards.

At the other end—kinda—there was a tweet by NPR on a story about how Italians celebrate Festa Della Donna, with flowers, wine and a special cake that sounds pretty scrummy. I mean—feminism is as feminism does.

But what gave me the giggles about it was this reply:

Just another way that the US has fallen behind the rest of the world.

Gratitude Monday: True colors

Today’s subject of my gratitude may seem a little odd, because I’m wildly thankful that the Kleptocrat in the White House and the Gauleiters around him were so egregious in their overreach during his first week in power. Because this display of arrogance, belligerence and just downright ignorance of governance (much less of Constitutional governance) made it clear to every thinking person on the planet that there will be neither reason nor compassion in this administration or its Republican enablers. And that the sooner these replicants are replaced by actual human beings, the better for us all.

From the ongoing bitching (and lying) about the number of people who attended his coronation (including an appalling performance at the CIA headquarters and a call to the director of the US Park Service demanding to know why photos that showed the empty spaces on the National Mall were made public) to the executive orders beginning the destruction of the ACA, denying FHA mortgage relief, abandoning AFTA, an across-the-board hiring freeze at federal agencies, banning overseas funding to healthcare organizations that offer abortion services or referrals, demanding an “investigation” into alleged voter fraud (which could be the only explanation, in his mind, for him not winning the popular vote “in a landslide”, as he believes he deserves), completely refusing to deal with the obvious conflicts of interests around his businesses, greenlighting the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline environmental-disasters-in-the-making, banning immigration from a select number of preponderantly-Muslim nations (that do not currently do business with his companies), and, of course, ordering federal employees to stop releasing research findings about any scientific inquiry that his Gauleiters find contrary to their business interests—the tiny-handed tweeter has made it abundantly clear what his vision of the world looks like, and that he expects to make that vision reality.

And a grim reality it would be, starting with that gag order on government research agencies.

Seriously—that research is funded by taxpayer dollars (which, to be fair, he’s about to cut off), and they are obligated to be completely transparent about their findings. Moreover, it is part of the basic genetic structure of scientists to share their research, no matter where it leads. Not doing that is considered deeply unethical.

I’m grateful for this because if he’d taken a slower path to the obliteration of our Constitutional and the world’s basic human rights, he might have been able to slip enough of the Nuremberg Laws past us before we realized what was happening and they were all the harder to uproot. By unzipping his trousers and waving his willie at us, he basically pissed off so many people with brains, consciences and social media accounts that you can probably hear the uproar on the Space Station.

I’m particularly thankful for all the Alt-[agency name] and Rogue [agency name] Twitter accounts that (I hope to God) are tweeting from a variety of coffee shops and Wi-Fi hotspots, possibly using a secure platform for confounding attempts to track them down and terminate them with extreme prejudice. Because they’re tweeting scientific facts, over and over again.

Not the, you know, “alternative facts” the kakistocracy prefers. Which makes what they’re doing very dangerous.

It started with @AltUSNatParkSer, shortly after tweets from Badlands National Park on climate change were deleted and a curtain drawn around them. (The social media lead for @BadlandsNPS was basically the radioman on the Titanic sending out SOS messages until Iceberg Kleptocrat melted, sending the truth down to the briny deep.)

In short order there were several rogue Badlands accounts, including this one:

And @RogueNASA:

Look at the number of their followers. All of them.

And CDC, NOAA and others. One I particularly follow is @RoguePOTUSStaff:

I don’t know whether they’re actually in the White House or not. If so, they’re bloody brave. If not, they’re still shining the light of transparency on this administration:

Well, you get the drift. Follow them. And retweet them.

The list is growing—and you know it’s a thing when PC World is reporting on it. Also it’s a thing when within hours of each account popping up, it has hundreds of thousands of followers.

Moreover, following on House Speaker Paul Ryan's spineless toadying (yeah, I know toads have spines; it's a metaphor) this week, Wikipedia, for one brief, shining moment, showed him prominently on the invertebrate page. I am so glad that I've donated to Wikipedia; I consider my ROI to have been beyond expectation.

(Apologies to the horseshoe crabs.)

On a perhaps more serious note, the media has begun referring to “alternative facts” as lies, both on screen and in print. Even those without big budgets for defending weaponized libel suits. And many publications, including The Guardian and WaPo, have set up encrypted portals for people in and out of government to securely report events anonymously.

At any rate—even though I am extremely pessimistic about the situation here and abroad caused by the Kleptocrat, I’m truly grateful that they waved their flags so egregiously right away, and for people inside and outside the government who are not allowing repression to take hold without a fight.