Huh?

What is it, these days, with politicians and the affect of military uniforms.

I understand why Bush was wearing a flight suit when he landed on the carrier. He was getting out of a jet where that was the required garb. I have mixed opinions about his being shown in it. I certainly mislike the use of it in campaign ads.

His affectation of flight jackets, with service logos, and the words, "Commander in Chief" also bother me (as did his wearing of PT gear when he went to serve supper in Baghdad).

We have had military men as president before. We started with one. But none of them were in the service when they were president. It rubs me the wrong way. Civilians make the big call (when, where and how to use force). It's part of the bargain that gets made. We give up some of our autonomy (agreeing to obey all lawful orders, even if we don't like them. Even if we disagree with them. Kind of like cops and enforcing laws, at least in theory) and we know that someone else does the heavy lifting in deciding such things.

But the uniform thing is spreading. Schwarzenegger showed up at some spot, when rhe Russian River was flooding in Northern California, in that same sort of bomber jacket, with the same sort of embroidery.

That sort of, not quite, militarism grates, but this galls.



That's a picture of Congressman Bob Beauprez; running for Governor in Colorado.

He's got quite a few patches on that uniform. One of them seems to be some sort of crew wings. At best they are honorary, a courtesy to a guest (sort of like getting foreign jump-wings for doing a jump with them. I know one guy who has half-a dozen; and cycles through them just to get reactions); he hasn't earned them.

How do I know this? Why do I care?

Because he dodged the draft. Not once, not twice, but four times. The last of those (in 1970) was after his deferments were up (three of those) and so was his number (160, in a year the call up went to 185). He reported for his physical, but was medically disqualified.

But now, with a war on (which he can't be forced to take part in) he's all about clothing himself in some reflected glory. After all, flight suits are spiffy. They make a guy look manly, resolute (in a way that a flack-jacket and k-pot don't). To fly one of those one has to have nerves of steel and fast reflexes, be able to make critical decisions in split-seconds, when the world is crashing in on you and it would be easy to give in to panic.

But Beauprez, he's just borrowing someone else's finery. Finery they bought and paid for with time, effort, the mastery of fear and indecision.

He's a sham, a poser, a fraud.

Overheard (rude language)

I was on the bus last week, heading to Poly to go walk the dogs with Maia. (We had a nice walk, saw a couple of hawks, white, but not in a place I could get a decent photo, looked at lichen, trained the dogs and saw a bat).

The bus is an interesting place. I forget some of the things I like about the bus; because the things I like about the car cause me to avoid the bus (time; taking the bus to Poly means budgeting at least two hours, from when I walk out the door, just to get there. It's a 20 minute drive. Maia's schedule is such that [because of the bus's schedule] I have almost an hour's wait after I arrive).

I can read. Not just the bloggy-goodness I soak up at home, but books (which I don't read so many of as I used to. Back when I didn't have a car, I was cranking through 4-10 books a week, these days, maybe two). I also get to watch/listen to people.

Friday was a humdinger.

I get to the stop. Because the driver of this bus isn't all that good I have to arrive at least ten minutes before it's supposed to pull up.(If I were running a bus line, he'd be fired. He rushes his schedule, so he can stop and smoke, lies to people ["I only stop at Gov't Center" which wasn't true. It's a regional line, not a city line, so it has fewer stops, but there were at least two other stops. I think he lied to me as well, when he said the bus was damaged, and so leaving service at Gov't center. He gave me a pass, and a buck to hop a city line, but still. I walked to Poly before the city line could have delivered me... and that was about a two-mile schlepp] Maia says she's seen him pass people up, and he almost blew by me once).

So I get to the stop. I sit down and take out my present reading (The Stories of English by David Crystal. Really good). Guy comes up and asks me when the bus comes. I tell him. His manner puts me on guard. White guy, late 20s, hair a little unkempt, a hint of "ghetto" to his dress. Not freshly shaved, and sort of loose in the joints. Clean enough, but sort of bent.

He's talking to someone, I think on a cell-phone as I read. It's a nervous sort of reading, not so much because this guy is hovering, not quite in eyesight (there's a switchbox of some sort next to the bench, it blocks the view to the west) but because I am afraid the driver will ignore me if I'm not on my feet when he sees me.

Then this guy starts yelling, "There he is, the fucker said he was out of town, but there he is." It's at this point I realise a woman, and a kid in a stroller, are with him. He goes out into the second lane of traffic, as the cars stop at the light, and starts yelling at the occupants of the car. From body language, and a limited view (there are other cars in the road) it seems he is spitting into the car. Various threats are made (I have no idea what the occupants of the car said) and he struts back to the curb.

The car leaves at the turn of the light. Not as I would have done (slowly) but with a racing motor and a squeal of tires.

The guy comes over and asks again about the bus. I repeat that it ought to be along any moment.

They walk off. I can still see them, a hundred yards away, as the bus heaves into view.

Sitting on the bus, watching the people come and go (SLO has a hub sort of system. The Regional buses have a few stops, and at points along the way they coincide with various city lines, so there are spurts of on/offloading. As well as large groups of people sitting at some stops). Tooling along Hwy 1, through Pismo there's a tennis court on the right.

A group of three, siblings; I think, are on the court. A teen, and a couple of kids, roughly 5-7. All are wearing the same outfit. Shoes, and black shorts, no shirt. One of the younger ones is female. She is careless. She's hot, playing with her brothers and as comfortable as she can manage. The bus suddenly has three converstations going as the people notice the girl. Consensus seems to be that it's borderline acceptable. The one person said (from the other end of the bus), "It's all right some places," with the tone that this place wasn't quite right, but not so wrong as to be beyond pale, for people of questionable class.

The couple in front of me (about twenty, somewhat silly, with an infantin a stroller) were talking about this and that, and chatting with the man across the way (mid-thirties, hispanic, with a toddler, in a stroller) and she took a couple of pictures. Small point and shoot digital. She complained it wasn't really focusing right. She said she knew how to use a "manual" camera, and that they were all right, "If you had the time and knew exactly what you wanted." but she was going to stick to her digital camera.

Got it. Manual equals film.

Got to Poly, watched the students go by. Picked up the pots Maia was going to take to the raku party on Saturday (it was nice, lots of good pots, a drum that broke in the kiln, and one that didn't. Freestanding kilns, on wheels. A jet, for propane, a cylinder of kao-wool [I think. I'll ask Jen on Tuesday] and a floor of firebrick. Gets to about cone 06/05. The day went late enough to take some pictures of glowing pots, glazed and glistening, as the kilns were lifted away) and went to wait for her to pick me up.

Which was when I heard the idjits, "...[improve] my chance for getting pussy, because now I'll have somewhere to take it."

I guess my shock showed on my face, because the speaker saw me and said hello, asking, "how you doing sir?" It isn't that I don't think young men are shallow on the subject of sex (or young women for that matter, having one of the women at the raku party explaining there was no point in getting a male stripper for another's 21st birthday because there were only two, and they stank, the one who can dance is scrawny and the better looking one has no grace, and that for a while there was only one, and that was the skinny one; but mostly I don't get to hear women on the topic, or at least not more grown up women) but the thrust of the language got me.

I wouldn't have blinked if he'd been talking about the act, not the part. If he'd said, "It'll improve my chance to score/get some/etc." it would have been fine. I expect people to think about sex that way. The younger they are the more I expect it.

But to reduce a partner to an "it," that's wrong.

But I got to see hawks, and lichens, and a bat, so the day was all right.

On things done in the States

There've been more than a few words written about the NSA's non-FISA approved wiretaps.

Forgetting the legality of them, for the moment (the question the Administration is raising is one of presidential power, we'll come back to this) because that's a different question from the effctiveness of them (which is different from the effect, we may come back to that too, but it's probably grist for another post).

Wiretaps can be goldmines. They are also labor intensive. Many years ago I was whored out to a three-letter agency to translate a bunch of international wiretap recordings. Boring. Really boring. I did this for two-weeks straight. The first problem, I only spoke two of the languages in use (I think there were four, but it might have been more. The region in which the far end of the conversation took place is a family of languages I know nothing about, and I might infer the tap included calls which never "entered" the U.S.), the second, in those eighty-plus hours of tape I listened to, was a lot of conversation about laundry, where to go for dinner, and the like.

Could it have been code? Yep. Which meant I had to write it all up, index it to the tape and file duplicate copies, one master, and one attached to the tape.

That was one investigation. It was the fruit of months of wiretaps (or at least weeks) and condensed, so I could go through it. It took my effort, to translate, and then someone else's effort to look at my translations, compare that to what was known about the subjects and then decide what it all meant.

I have no idea if it was ever useful.

Multiply that by thousands, and you have the NSA taps.

It's like taking a shotgun to blow the candles on a birthday cake. If you get close enough, you can hit some, but you'll miss most; and the cake will be pretty much ruined.

Step back a bit, and you'll probably miss the candles (and the cake).

In either case something a bit more discriminating would better serve.

As to power, presidential power, the White House is arguing that the FISA statute is unconstitutional, sort of. The crux of the argument is that in a "time of war," the Congress has no constitutional authority to limit the president in it's prosecution. This is a scary doctrine. Not only because it completely upsets the checks and balances which make the system work, but because one of the quirks of the constitution is that the President makes treaties, and wars are ended with treaties. If we are at war with, "terrorism" then the only person who can declare it over, is the president. In theory the view of powers the White House is espousing would allow the president to approve the budget, in those portions which are "essential" to the war effort.

Since the White House got legislation passed which allows the Director of Homeland Security to ignore any law, regulation, or rule, which interferes with the mission to secure the borders, and the recent request of the DoJ to the State of Arizona to allow the Arizona Secratary of State to suspend elections, pretty much at whim... one might be forgiven for becoming a "nutbar conspiracy theorist," and wondering if this might be a test for things which were whispered about before the last election (what would happen if a, "credible," terrorist threat were to arrive just before an election?).

Also this week Newsweek reports that, "a Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States.

Not that he could allow a cop/federal agent to shoot someone who posed an immediate threat to the lives of others, but suspects. You know, like de Menezes. We all know how well that worked. The guy did go on to say, "the president would be on less solid legal ground were he to order the killing of a terror suspect in the United States who was not actively preparing an attack.

Not that such an authorization would be, ipso facto illegal, just less solid than if the guy were shown to be preparing (not carrying out, preparing) an attack. Of course that will be cold comfort for the families of the de Menezes of the world, who will have to accept the deaths of their families as a small personal sacrifice for the greater good.

Fear

I keep seeing people telling us the thing we need to most worry about is being safe, and that so long as people hear one side promising to do that, the other side will lose.

And I wonder when America became afraid.

Not the reasonable reaction to actual attack. No, I mean the deep-down, nervous in our bones because we are vulnerable, everywhere, all the time.

It baffles me. When I was younger I was unaware of it. FDR said the only thing we had to fear was fear itself, and that was so much gibberish. Fear wasn't something to be afraid of, because it wasn't common. Something scares you, you deal with it and move on. The beasties under the bed... they go away (I was terrified for weeks of the creatures in the dark, it seemed, after watching [at the age of about nine], The Haunting of Hull House. I've seen it since, and it's not all that horrific, but memory still tells me that movie is terrifying, but I digress). A flashlight, and a few nights of not being killed in the night and all is right with the world.

So what was the big deal about fear?

Then came the big puch for, "Law and Order." I seem to remember campaigns about this in the past (when I was a wee tot, about the same time that movies kept me from dangling my arm between the bed and the wall) being about how tough to be on the people we caught. These days, however, it's about how to protect ourselves (or our children) from the menace that lurks in the dark. It started with carjackers, and break-in robberies (not that that's anything new, back in the days of wattle and daub houses, raiders would kick the walls down and make off with whatever they thought valuable. That's when breaking and entering was done in earnest. There I go, digressing again).

Now it's child-molesters (who can't be allowed to live too close to schools. If they live within a quarter mile they are somehow more dangerous. Me; I figure anyone who can convince a kid to walk a home with them can probably get them to hop a bus or get in a car... but that plays on fear.

Maybe it started in 1982, with the Tylenol Murders in Chicago (oddly enough I was in Chicago at the time they happened). People went nuts. Since then we've banned commercial sale of capsules, put, "tamper-proof" seals on damn near everything (which only sort of work. Someone managed to put acid into contact lens solution in Los Angeles some time back. Since I was wearing contact lenses at the time I noticed it).

It probably started in the fifties. The air-raid drill to save ourselves from "The Bomb". I can remember that dread. The first night I noticed the orange glow that was the city lights trapped by yesterdays smog, and wondering if it was Los Angeles being reduced to ash. The camping trips with my Scout Troop, on which the Troop Leader brought a small radio. We all knew it was to check the news, "just in case."

It didn't help to have a president who joked about, "The bombing starts in 15 minutes." I like a piece of black humor as much as the next guy, maybe more, but that one didn't work. That's gone now, mostly, and instead we worry about e-coli in our burgers and heart attacks from our diet pills.

But the risk of these things is small, trivial. Lightening is more likely to strike one than an event like that to have personal effect.

If it stopped there (with the nervous looks at everyone when heading into the parking lot, and the annoying seals on packets, from band-aids to chewing gum) it would be bad enough, but not something to worry about, but it's soaked into our political discourse. We have let fear become our agenda.

And it's killing us. Not, perhaps literally (though one wonders at the rates of depression) but spiritually. We have let this vague dread that something might happen to us to shape our politics. The president of the United States can get up, and with a straight face say his most important job is to "keep Americans safe," and that he will do, "whatever it takes," to bring that about.

Excuse me? I think a guy who's supposed to be the Executive of a country with 300 million people, an economy in the strangest, "recovery" or "robust condition" or whatever odd-description they are using to describe a gap between rich and poor which is so great it can be called a gulf, who has deficits so large that they surpass the idea of, "real money" atributed to Ev Dirksen.

Fear is scary stuff. I've been afraid. The short-term, breath-stopping, gut-clenching, knee-weakening, just short of bowel-loosening fear. I've also been the long-term, slow-grinding, sleep-destroying, joy-killing sort of fear. They both sucked, but you know what? Fear is the enemy there. You figure out what, if anything you can do about the thing which is actually threatening you, and you cope with it. You can shove that genie back in the bottle. He'll get out again, but fear is only dangerous when you let it be.

The White House is using fear. I don't know what they want, but what I see happening angers me (I was going to say scares me, but that's not right). Every time they turn around they are scaring us. Terror Alerts (until that nerve was so worn out it might as well be dead), terrorists (under every bed) WMD, Rogue States, fifth colunists and sleeper cells, everywhere you look is something dreadful.

And if you would only trust them that they know what it is you need to be afraid of, they can protect you.

Bullshit.

It's a emotional club, like an abusive parent who says you aren't pretty, or talented, or smart. This trope is that we don't know what to do, or how to protect ourselves. So we have to trust them. They know what's best. Looking at the record, I have my doubts.

But we've bought into it.

Gov. Tom Vilsack said Monday that Democrats risk political backlash if they object to the Bush administration's wiretapping but cannot show that Americans' civil liberties are at risk.

The Democratic governor, who is weighing a 2008 presidential bid, said the party will suffer if it continues to be perceived as weaker than Republicans on national security.

. . . "If the president broke the law, that's unacceptable. But I think it's debateable whether he did," Vilsack told Des Moines Register editors and reporters. "And I think Democrats are falling into a very, very large political trap," he said. "Democrats are not going to win elections until they can reassure people they are going to keep them safe."

From what are we being kept safe? Terrorists? Not likely. Not the way we're doing it.

"The sum of "international" and "domestic" terrorist attacks in 2005 was 3991, up 51 percent from the previous year's figure of 2639. The number of deaths that resulted from those attacks was 6872, which is 36 percent higher than the 5066 that occurred in 2004."BTC News if you follow the links to the Terrorism Analytical Data Baseof the National Counterterrorism Center, you can do lots of searcing, make spiffy graphs and see how well the whole thing has been going. There's a a lot of stuff there.

Fear has always been part of the political landscape. Fear of the other, fear of our baser nature, fear of those who actually want to do away with us.

Walt Kelly saw this, and summed it up, "We have me the enemy, and he is us." Which was a restating of Ben Franklin's answer when asked what sort of nation the Constitutional Convention had given us, "A Republic madam, if you can keep it."

FDR said, "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance," and that facing a depression so widspread we called it "Great."

Al Gore quoted Eisenhower, and Justice Brandeis, President Eisenhower said this: "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote, "Men feared witches and burnt women."

Feared witches and burnt women.

What are we afraid of? Are we burning down the house to stave off the dark dread of the beasties that lurk in the night? If we do that, there will be nothing to keep the bitter wind of winter from our backs.