to whom do I owe this debt?

Strikes me that the one thing the U.S. has manufactured successfully this past year is a sense of crisis over the national debt, which has been around for decades because -- now here's novel thought -- that's how capitalism works.

Occupy by the numbers

       As I looked at a photo of thousands of Egyptians filling Tahrir Square once again, I contrasted it with pix of Americans at Occupy encampments, then reminded myself how decentralized and large this country is.  Is ground zero for the movement Wall Street?  What about the equally large & persistent & perhaps better organized Occupy Boston?  Or Occupy Oakland, where a vet who was beaned & badly injured by the police  became a rallying cry?  Should the center be in Washington, where the officials who can actually change the protested policies gather? 
        Then I began to wonder if anyone has tried to count the number of Americans who have been involved in the occupy movement.  There are approximate tallies for people sleeping at various encampments -- a total somewhere in the high hundreds, I'd guess -- but others who have rallied, marched, taught, dropped by and dropped off supplies over the last two months must number well into the thousands.  Many thousands, probably. As many as rallied to overthrow governments in north Africa, even?  It would be an interesting & enlightening undertaking for some enterprising soul to gather the info from all the reports -- kind of like icasualties, which keeps track of deaths and injuries in Iraq & Afghanistan, using news and govt. reports.  It would take time and need to be maintained & updated, but time seems to be on the side of occupiers.   I suspect the numbers would be too.

something's happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

Breathes there a man with soul so dead who hasn't yet weighed in on the occupy movement and its why, whither and if?  So apologies to whomever I'm citing without credit bcs I can't remember, but this struck me as a true and smart observation on the significance of the occupations: They have made it so that selfishness and greed are no longer cool.  The bumper sticker proclaiming, "The person who dies with the most toys wins" got retired a while ago, but the philosophy has thrived and may explain why a lot of the 99% has put up with getting screwed over by the 1%.  So RIP to sophomoric Ayn Randism (in peace only bcs I like pacifism) and let's move on to the the next step, which is recognizing that we're going to have to do more than just redistribute the resources -- although that's not a bad place to start.

Why we're now occupied with occupations

I've been thinking a lot about how an impulse or dissatisfaction becomes a political movement, as the economic fairness encampments around the country might -- and when it doesn't -- as with the antiwar cause, which attracted hundreds of thousands before the invasion of Iraq and the agreement of the majority of Americans since 2007, but never really took off.  A major reason it didn't was that a tiny portion of Americans have anything to do with the people who have been fighting those wars -- the slogan could have been, "1% at war versus the 99% who get to ignore it" --  but the occupy everywheres don't represent 99% of Americans either.  At most, the 74% who are neither very poor, nor very rich.  Still, it's smart marketing to assume common cause among that three-quarters, despite the diversity of economic and political perspectives within, and I believe the protests are a genuine cri de coeur from younger people who are discovering that they've been screwed over by the system they're eager to be a part of.  What I've come to realize -- it's so obvious and it makes me sad -- is that Americans may take to the barricades over a principle, but they stay there in large numbers only when it's their own interest at stake.

texting for a certain age

YFHOO -- ya-fuckin-hoo
NMP -- not my problem
nsoh -- no sense of humor
cd -- charm deprived
Wapita -- What a pain in the ass!
Wiwt -- Whose idea was this?
Wwit -- What was I thinking?

OCCUPY BOSTON

NOT AFGHANISTAN* 

*or Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, etc.
(of course I have to have footnotes)


We're beginning to get discussion, however superficial, about what constitutes a political movement.  History profs weighing in that movements need identifiable spokespeople, old lefties noting ruefully that we've been here before, a pal laughing that the general assemblies (GA on the website -- I keep thinking they're talking about Georgia) sound like the crafts coop she used to be a part of --  on steroids.  Me, I quote Oscar Wilde that the trouble with socialism is that it would take too many evenings.

But for all that (and the (non)organizers do seem to be getting degrees in meetings and the signs aren't yet witty enough, or the rhythm section jazzy enough), I keep hoping that maybe they're on to something new -- where they don't have to give the press a star protester to fuck and then fuck over (anyone recall Camp Casey and Cindy Sheehan?), or give the politicians something to co-opt and water down to meaninglessness (examples too numerous to mention), or have to court money people to keep going (it's a real worry that some organization, such as MoveOn, will move in and tame the protest into a rally for the Dems), or end up replicating the liberation movements of my generation (for better and worse).  Seems to me the title of "movement" gets bestowed mostly in retrospect because real grassroots movements are  inchoate and evolving while they're happening and because we can't know what will change history until history is changed. So maybe the thing to embrace right now is a willingness to be surprised.

10 years on

It's been a dismal ten years in American public life.  Paul Auster on the BBC

a question

The host of a blather show on NPR suggests that maybe “we all,” by which I think he means all U.S. Americans, are “suffering from a stress disorder.”  But if an entire society has a disorder, doesn’t it become the norm?  And if the norm is dysfunctional, then isn’t it time to consider changing the norm?

dark, darker, darkest horses

I'm already weary of the prez election race with its flavor of the week (Palin might, Romney lies, Bachman OMG! Perry OMG2) and we're months out.  So I've decided to sit this one out until the Triple Crown -- or maybe even the Belmont -- when I'll know which campaigner to bother getting hysterical about.

82% disapprove of Congress -- but the real question is...

18% approve?  Who are these people?

together again?

The new bipartisanship: equal disdain for everyone

suicide ain't painless

So the prez will now send condolence letters to families of service members who commit suicide in combat zones, tho not elsewhere or later, which is where and when many deployment-related suicides happen.  Good.  Now, let's see, what else could he do to improve the situation? Like maybe end the misbegotten wars and remove that cause of moral injury?

okay, let's belabor a point

What's in the Daily News? I'll tell you what's in the Daily News

(with apologies to Frank Loesser) -- what's in the daily news is story after story about the ineptitude of Iraqi or Afghan police & soldiers with veiled/not-too-veiled pleas for U.S. forces to stick around and hold their hand.  You know, we really really want to bring our troops home and end these wars, but they just won't let us.  What ya gonna do?  (I don't think we've gotten a story yet about a guy in the government there who bought his wife a small ruby with what otherwise would have been his reconstruction dues, but when we do, remember that you read it here first.)

MILITARY RAPE (another of my upbeat stories)

MILITARY RAPE: Rampant, Ignored
by Nan Levinson

When Panayiota Bertzikis tried to tell her commanding officers that she had been raped by a shipmate in May 2006 four months into her tour at the Burlington, Vt. Coast Guard Station, they discouraged her from talking to an Equal Opportunity officer, barred her from seeing a civilian therapist, ignored a written confession from her attacker, and browbeat her into silence.  No wonder she thought she was the only one this had happened to.

But thanks to victims-turned-activists, such as Bertzikis, who are pulling military sexual trauma out from the shadows, it’s becoming harder for the U.S. military to ignore the problem.  In February, Bertzikis, along with 14 other women and two men, filed a lawsuit (Cioca et al v Rumsfeld and Gates), charging Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, with mishandling their sexual assault cases.  New plaintiffs are being added.

MST is an epidemic -- nearly a quarter of women serving in combat areas say they have been sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers – but everyone agrees that reliable statistics don’t exist.  The Pentagon, which recorded 3,158 incidents of sexual assault in 2010 (a slight decrease from 2009), estimates that only about 14 percent of all incidents are reported.