🎵 Ivanka and the King of I Am 🎵

(with apologies to Oscar Hammerstein)

He will not ever say

what you would have him say,

but now and then he'll say

something horrible.

The thoughtless things

he'll do will hurt and worry you.

Then all at once he'll do

something terrible.

He has a thousand dreams

that won't come true.

Who knows if he believes in them.

They’re aimed at screwing you.

chorus sung by the bass:

You'll always go along,

defend him when he's wrong.

tell him when he's headstrong

he is wonderful.

He'll always need your love

and so he'll get your love.

It's unfathomable.

for the new year

EARTH RISE
I wish for the new year a rebirth of wonder,
Not just about how to get out from under,
Or to figure out how, more or less,
We got ourselves into this ungodly mess.
So let's raise a glass, a pinky or a shout
For, if we got ourselves in, we can get ourselves way out!

Bad week -- for us all, whether we know it or not

Dutifully went to let's-treat-immigrants-as-people rally yesterday on City Hall Plaza in 90-plus degree heat (note to Brutalist architects: plant trees). Found a bit of shade from which we couldn't hear or see the speakers, didn't matter because I knew what they were saying (accurate & suitably outraged, but no less predictable for being so). My contribution: another body to swell the count. We stood, chatted, noted the usually earnest, occasionally witty T's and signs, then decamped for oysters in the North End. This is not enough. This really isn't anything. I need to do direct action, civ dis, something to make a dent. 

 

                                 me trying to get out of photo of cute kids that appeared 

                                 in the Boston Globe report of an earlier rally at the State House

Hobbes on Trump?

Ok, because no one reads this, I'll amuse myself with Trump dumps (which, I admit, would be a lot more amusing if he weren't really prez).

So, to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, the natural state 

of Trumpkind is nasty, brutish,
and short-fingered.

A Trump Thesaurus (a work in progress)

Of all the possible complaints about Donald Trump, a limited vocabulary should rank 
low on the list, and not just because it’s a telltale sign of the elitism we’re supposed to 
scorn these days. But Trump’s language – in his speeches, rare press conferences, 
interviews, tweets, and tossed-off asides — highlights the Manichaean view that 
seems to inform his beliefs and actions. (Manichaeanism – Damn! Is it more elite 
to define it or not to? — was a philosophy that divided the world into good and evil.) 
So with a bow to Roget, herewith:

A TRUMP THESAURUS

Part 1

good (adj.) terrific, beautiful, amazing, smart, tremendous, uge, big league
(aka bigly), first, best, most, greatest, very, very good, wonderful, 
unbelievable, like never before

(noun) tough talk, Wikileaks, wall

(pronoun) I, me, my (see above: best, most, greatest)

Part 2

bad (adj) disgusting, sad, disgraceful, dishonest, terrible, unfair, stupid, 
not funny, overrated, ugly, so-called, phony

(noun) loser, really bad dudes, radical Islamic terrorists, leakers, 
fake news, failing New York Times

I was all set to say there is no Part 3 when I came across this explication 
of Trump’s vocabulary at a recent press conference:

military operation (adj) stepped-up deportation of undocumented immigrants, 
emphatically not having anything to do with the military. “The president was 
using that as an adjective. It’s being done with precision and in a manner 
in which it’s being done very, very clearly” (Sean Spicer).

Letter to NYT Sunday Magazine 1/11/17

RE: THE FIGHTER 

War Is Not/Shouldn't Be finally made it into the NYT

C.J. Chivers wrote about Sam Siatta, a Marine Corps veteran, and his fraught journey home.

It was reassuring to learn that Sam Siatta is finally getting the medical and psychological care he needs, and I hope the government will fund fully the treatment required by those who fight our perpetual war. But for some kinds of wounds, there is no palliation. In addition to his psychological injuries, Siatta may be dealing with a moral injury.

Moral injury results from doing or witnessing something significant that violates your deeply held beliefs about yourself and your role in the world. It isn’t a disease or a diagnosis, and though it may be related to PTSD, it is more a sickness of the heart than of the head, so it can’t be medicated away. It’s not necessary for someone to be trained as a killer to be marked in this way because, at its most basic, moral injury is the recognition that few, if any, escape from war unscathed. Apparently, the only sure way to avoid the moral injury of war is not to go to war in the first place. Nan Levinson, Somerville, Mass.

sexual assault in the military

By the Pentagon's own reckoning, only about 1 in 60 of the reported sexual assaults in the U.S. military resulted in jail time. (Estimates of actual assaults are several times greater.) Turns out that's not so different from civilian proportions. That in itself ought to be disturbing enough, but in the military, where the chain of command controls nearly every aspect of a serviceperson's life, there is no recourse and no escape. Solving the problem -- i.e. stopping sexual assault utterly-- is complicated and requires long-term approaches, but there is a specific one that would help -- a lot. That is taking the decision whether or not to prosecute from commanders, who often have conflicting interests, and giving it to trained and more impartial legal entities. The United States Congress has had the opportunity to do that 3 times in the past few years and has either voted against that change or, as happened a couple of months ago, refused even to debate it.

Here's my story about congressional pusillanimity and what some organizations and individuals are doing about it. Thanks to Waging Nonviolence for publishing it.

Americans think the wars weren't such a good idea

That's the latest insight from an AP poll.  It only took a decade, 60,277 tallied Iraqi lives, around 20,000 Afghan lives, 6800 American lives, and god knows how much money.

Another voice gone, already missed

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014), a wise voice, presence and conscience for many years + a writer of memorable stories. RIP, since she didn't appear to rest or encounter much peace in her lifetime.

military suicide down: yes, but

The most recent stats out of the Pentagon indicate that suicide among the active-duty military went down a significant percentage since last year (somewhere around 15%, depending on which numbers you use), but increased among reservists and the National Guard, so that now they outnumber active-duty suicides.  The Army, in particular, believes the measures it has instituted to counter suicidal tendencies have helped, and fingers crossed that that's true, but the kicker for me came toward the end of the AP article:

"According to Army data, more than half of the reservists who committed suicide in 2012 and 2013 had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Officials, however, have not been able to establish a strong link between military service on the warfront and suicide."

Ok, yes, we like "strong links" as evidence; they're more reliable than anecdotes, and there is that other substantial group who hadn't deployed before they killed themselves.  Also, I'm increasingly wary of confirmation bias -- the tendency to believe evidence that proves what you already believe.  But might  the premises behind the research make it hard to figure out what's really going on?  Can it really be that being trained to kill reflexively has no repercussions?  Or that being a part, even at a distance, of a mechanism that engages in such senseless, futile, soul-sucking belligerencies doesn't take a toll?

It has always seemed obvious to me that the best way to prevent suicide, PTSD and other psychic distress is not to send heavily-armed people into such untenable situations in the first place.  Ah, yes, but then we'd have to reckon with what we've been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and now Africa and god knows where else in the first place -- and we don't seem to have any encouraging statistics for that.

Levinson’s 1st Law of the Marketplace

Law: Good stuff gets replaced by crap. 
Corollary: Not long after, a backlash offers good stuff as an alternative to crap – usually at a higher price for consumers who like to think they have discovered something new.

a war lost

For the first time that I can recall, popular opposition stopped a war action by the U.S.  It wasn't just citizen resistance to another misbegotten incursion into someone else's civil war; the military thought it was a rotten idea too. So bravo for that -- or at least a sigh of relief.  For now. 

Yes, it's hardly a perfect solution: not lobbing Tomahawk missiles is a far cry from peace and a lot of people were let off the hook who should be on the hook.  Syria's violent revolution and its government's violent suppression of that revolution will continue (I'm not making an equivalence here; Assad's government has the power and apparently the will to be more ruthless), thousands of people will die, communities will be destroyed, hundreds of thousands of lives will be upended, and those mind-boggling refugee camps will continue to grow and grow and grow.  (Spending the cost of several Tomahawks there would be a way to start addressing that misery.)  Still, for one moment, our government has acknowledged, at least tacitly,  that not all international problems require a military solution, and for that, I'm grateful.

deja vu all over again

The U.S. is no doubt going to war in.on/over/with Syria -- with rush-to-judgement "evidence," little international support (or national, for that matter), and clear signs that we will be sucked into something we can't control.  I don't doubt for a minute that Assad is monstrous or that the people in Syria are suffering massively and tragically.  Nor do I doubt that Obama is a smart man and, unlike his predecessor, not keen to swashbuckle his way into war.  I suppose he's equally in thrall to the interests of oil companies and, like all presidents, unable to take on the military.

But, still, don't they ever goddamn learn?   

slow learning curve

When protests erupted in Istanbul at the end of May and police forces reacted with a sledgehammer response that was both brutal and unnecessary, my husband asked, "Don't they ever learn?"  We had left the Taksim neighborhood only days before, so we could picture exactly where it was happening and -- because everyone in the city seemed to be selling something or building something -- why.  But the "they" were the government, which responded as governments and others in power do when they think they're loosing control: they try for more control.

It doesn't work, at least not in the long run and not usually in the short run either. You can't keep the lid on when it has already blown off and by now you'd think someone would have learned that out-of-proportion responses only make things worse.

The mess in Turkey has been followed in quick succession by the crackdown in Libya, the coup and resulting slaughter in Egypt, the rigged trial of Bradley Manning (which would have been much worse had the military been able to keep the public in the dark, as it no doubt was counting on), and just yesterday, the 9-hour detention and interrogation at London's Heathrow Airport of David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has pissed off a lot of people by aiding Edward Snowden's in publicizing the U.S. government's spying on its citizens.

I don't believe that power necessarily makes people stupid, but I don't get why people in power are so blinkered when it comes to responding to challenges to their power.  I don't get why they don't ever learn.

what's good for the union?

In a letter announcing a vote on unionization of part-time faculty at Tufts University, her deanship wrote: "We do not believe that unionization is necessarily in the best interest of the University as a whole or of all of the part-time lecturers."  Not at all surprising and it reads as boilerplate, but it makes me genuinely curious to know if any administration -- aka management -- at any time anywhere in the U.S. did believe unionization was in its best interest.