moral injury: mad bad sad

My piece on moral injury in veterans on TomDispatch.com (a blog worth following) and picked up by a lot of other sites.

Mom's the word revisted

So now momism is the political battleground de jour with the prez declaring that "being a mom is the hardest job in the world" and women who can afford it defending their "career choice" to be a "stay-at-home mom."  Pah-leeze!  Surely everyone knows that there are harder jobs out there. (President of the United States might qualify.)  And motherhood is not a career; it's a biological event -- which, BTW, many of those most outraged by the Dem. operative's dissing of Ann Romney want to make sure is moved beyond the realm of choice.

bad apples spoilers of war?

       A U.S. soldier leaves his base in Afghanistan in the middle of the night and murders 16 people asleep in their homes. This, the pundits tell us, may be the tipping point which ends a seemingly endless occupation.  Of course, there's also the bunch of Korans tossed in a pile at an air base to be burned and the photos Marines took of themselves peeing on what appear to be dead Afghans.  Not a good run for the military that calls itself the most highly trained in the world.
       That this string of debacles is tipping the scales won't come as a surprise to the antiwar soldiers who have been talking all along about the breakdown of the military.  A Vietnam veteran I know says the guy going ballistic is the sort of thing that should be caught by the chain of command before it happens, but  you can't fight a war without the bodies to fight it, long distance drones notwithstanding.  So what do you do when the whole damn thing is broken? Resistance takes many forms and I'm not convinced that fucking up isn't one of them.  (Murder may be too -- a repulsive thought -- but it's not an antiwar tactic.) 
              It didn't take long for those who frame such things to get to work promoting the idea that the murderous soldier (not to be confused with the soldiers who kill civilians by mistake -- intentions matter, right?) "snapped" after too many tours and injuries and the disappointment of being passed over for a promotion.  So he's an anomaly, albeit within a stressed-out military, a good sort who went bad in a war that has gone on too long.  A "bad apple" whose "atrocity" is easily distinguished from the rest of the night raids in Iraq and Afghanistan and whose victims (notice how quickly they disappeared from American news reporting) can be separated out from the "collateral damage" of war.

Then they came for the Muslms

So now the NYPD is tracking Muslim college students way outside of their jurisdiction.  Not that it would be any better if they restricted their tracking of people going about their law- abiding lives within the NYPD's jurisdiction.  Why doesn't this domestic surveillance set off major alarms?  If I may quote myself: People who believe they are surrounded by enemies will accept strict defensive measures.  I'd like to update that to "strict repressive measures."   And refer back to the previous post.

First they came for the terrorists?

The FBI has put out a request for information to the tech industry about developing software which would let them spy on all social media.  The RFI is looking for "Open Source and social media alert, mapping and analysis application solution," but not a proposal -- yet.  Apparently, the government can already follow Twitter and Facebook posts outside the U.S., but in the ever-expanding surveillance galaxy, that's no longer enough.  (See my article in In These Times for some background.)  Cops need to be able to suss out "pre-crime" in the cybersphere to keep us all very safe. 

Well, I don't post anything of concern or interest on Facebook or Twitter, so I don't have anything to worry about, right?  Except for that dire & much-cited warning of the theologian Martin Niemoller:
"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a Socialist.  Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out --because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me."

SSnipers

     Okay, anyone who believes that no one in a position to comment knew that the SS logo proudly displayed by a Marine sniper unit in Aghanistan had something to do with the Nazis, raise you hand.
     Right.  I thought so.  Let's move on.
     I don't believe that the guys in this unit necessarily share the tenets of Nazism.  In the photo that's causing the uproar, they look pretty young and may be ignorant of that era of history, though that's disconcerting in itself.   What I do believe is that they knew they were in the business of state-sponsored killing and wanted to honor themselves for that.  Marines enlist for a variety of reasons, but from the first minutes of boot camp, they know that they haven't signed up for a school outing. They may hope to make the world a better place, but what they're trained for is killing efficiently, without debate or second guessing.  Even Marines who don't relish that role know they may have to do it -- and by the time they finish their intensive and, I'm told, often tedious training, they're probably ready to put some of it into practice.  So this hand-wringing over association with a rightly vilified group of state-sponsored killers strikes me as yet one more instance of honoring image over reality.  I mean, what do we think snipers of any nationality do in Afghanistan? 
     Then there's the note, buried a few grafs in, that the photo had appeared on the blog of "a military weapons company."  For branding?  As a selling point and if so, selling what?  Nazi logos?  Or was there "no malicious intent" at that company either?
   

Occupy the brand

Read today a progressive opinonator writing that the Occupy movement is "a PR war."  Of course the political movement de jour would be all about brand recognition.  Why did I not recognize that immediately? And the occupiers have been successful in that, since I and everyone else seems unable to write a headline without riffing on "occupy."  Not to mention the very good 99% slogan.  So allow me to suggest another: The revolution will not be televised; it will be branded.

Who's watching the watchers? or From my paranoia file

My story on government surveillance of political protest from In These Times

Canaries in the Data Mines
by Nan Levinson
posted 1/5/12

 
"We’re going to have a little chat,” the plain-clothed officer said to Susan Barney as he fastened handcuffs around her wrists and led her from the cell at the Boston police station, where she was being held with three other political activists. It was January 2009, and they had been arrested after refusing to move from the lobby of the building that houses the Israeli consulate while taking part in a “die-in” to protest Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

This is odd, Barney thought. She had been arrested for civil disobedience several times and never before had the police wanted to chat.

Barney was led to a small room where the officer joined three other men around a table. They introduced themselves–she remembers someone from the Boston Police Department (BPD) and another from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)–and then began questioning her about her political activities and associations. Barney, schooled in civil disobedience and keenly aware of her rights, turned her back to the table and refused to answer, but not before one of her interrogators said, “I’m sure you recognize us. We come to all your protests.” She didn’t recognize them at the time, but now reports that two of them have shown up regularly at subsequent protests, including Occupy Boston.

The Boston police had not been masking their surveillance of political actions; sometimes they were literally in the face of the protesters with their cameras. Nor was it surprising that the police were feeding information to BRIC, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, one of 72 state and urban “fusion centers” set up a few years after 9/11 to encourage intelligence sharing among law enforcement agencies. But the more Barney and her fellow activists that day–Ridgely Fuller, Richard Hess and Patrick Keaney–thought about it, the more they wondered what happened to those reports of what they considered their constitutionally protected right to dissent. 
continued at:http://inthesetimes.com/article/12427/canaries_in_the_data_mines

 

OCCUPY

It's the word of the year, we're told, so I've been preoccupied with its various meanings & connotations: 
       There's the obvious -- occupy movements -- with their sense of occupying public space and the positive (at least for me) consequence of occupying the public debate about what a fair and well-functioning society owes its members. (My vote, to quote some civil liberties lawyer whose name I've long forgotten, is justice and groceries.)
       Then there's the much-awaited, can-you-believe-it-took-so-long end of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, though it wasn't usually called that.  We seemed to prefer calling it a war, and someday someone will explain to me why that's a more positive spin on that debacle.
       We're getting a spate of news stories -- someone just noticed -- about the difficulty faced by soldiers returning from that war in finding productive ways to occupy themselves, sniper and truck convoy driver not being high of the list of occupations needed in civil society.
       And our preoccupation with terrorism, which has led to the Orwellian concept of "pre-crime" -- sussing out intention to commit a crime sometime in the future by cobbling together bits of on-the-face-of-it legal behavior and then arresting the purported terrorist-in-the-making.  These days, he's apt to be a young, well-educated Muslim living in a suburb near you.  (See the recent conviction of Tarek Mehanna in Boston.) This occupation of our minds allows us to tolerate a very frightening national security system, whose secrecy and reach I tried to explore for my story in In These Times (which will be available online in a couple of weeks) and over-reaching laws with very broad definitions of what constitutes aid to the enemy. so that juries seldom decide against the government in cases of "domestic terrorism," regardless of the strength of the evidence.  (Remind anyone else of the anti-Communist witch hunts?  Reminds me of the aphorism that a long memory is the most radical act in America today.)
       Of course, occupy being the word of the year, it shows up in ads and jokes and my emails about my office hours.  My journalism class agreed that it was the occupy semester, since the encampments coincided almost perfectly with our classes.  (They didn't walk out.  Not sure if I'm pleased or dismayed.) 
 
So, inevitably, my holiday wishes for us all: OCCUPY THE NEW YEAR -- in style and peace!

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.