Author Archives: greg

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About greg

Just another bozo on the bus.

still pissing on the dead

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Last week I made a brief comment about the incident in which the members of a U.S. Marine sniper unit pissed on the bodies of Afghans they’d (presumably) killed. There were a couple of responses I found troubling, and I sort of feel the need to address some of the issues raised in them.

Joe said:

Wish ALL our troops were here home with their familys

I think we can all agree with that. However….

but our dumbass politicians/president whom have NEVER SERVED OR HAVE BEEN IN THIS SITUATION BEFORE

I’m not sure how this behavior can be attributed to President Obama or Congress. Certainly the behavior of troop units is a reflection of their leadership, but there are over 200,000 active duty Marines. It’s a bit silly to hold the civilian leadership of the military responsible for the behavior of individual units. That said, as I mentioned in the original comment, if you don’t want troops to piss on the bodies of their dead enemies, don’t send them to war.

The solution……DO NOT SHOOT AT OUR SERVICE MEN AND WOMEN AND WE WON’T HAVE TO CELEBRATE KICKIN YOUR STUPID ANTI-AMERICAN ASSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

First, you can’t blame Afghans for shooting at invading troops. It’s their country. Afghan tribes have been fighting against invaders ever since it became a semi-unified nation-state some three hundred years ago. Before they were shooting at U.S. troops, they shot at the Soviets. Before that, they shot at the British. Before that…well, just read the long history of Afghan tribal groups successfully repelling invading world superpowers.

Second, the Afghans who are shooting at the U.S. troops may, in fact, be anti-American, but I suspect they’re mostly anti-invader. I mean, they’ve also been shooting at the French and the British and the Dutch and the Italians and the Canadians (seriously, who’d shoot at a Canadian?) and a host of other nationalities. They’ll shoot at anybody who was attempting to occupy their country. So would you, Joe, if you were an Afghan. That’s what you do to invading armies—you shoot them. We’d do the same if (in some right wing Red Dawn fantasy) foreign troops invaded the U.S.

Finally, pissing on the dead is more an expression of contempt than a celebration. But even if there was some twisted psycho-sexual celebratory component to it, we don’t have to celebrate killing the enemy. This isn’t football. A victory dance in the end zone isn’t necessary. To suggest the ‘solution’ to this is for Afghans to refrain from shooting at U.S. troops is to massively fail to understand the situation.

WAKE UP AMERICA WE AE THE BEST,,,,,START SHOWING IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The more exclamation points we use, the better we are. But really, this isn’t a nationalist issue. It’s not about America. It’s about war. The Marines didn’t piss on the bodies of the dead because they were Americans; they did it because that sort of shit happens in war. They didn’t piss on the bodies of the Afghans because they were Afghans; they did it because war always dehumanizes everybody involved.

Daniel repeats (without attribution, by the way) the text of a statement issued by Republican Congressmane Allen West, but I’ve no doubt he agrees with Representative West.

I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu.

Neither you nor Rep. West may recall the outrage, but I do. The incident was widely reported and sparked a massive public outcry. Of course, the treatment of Shugart and Gordon was at the hands of a disorganized mob, not committed by a highly-trained and disciplined military unit, but they both reflect the same reality. War brutalizes the people who fight.

Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.

The teleprompter comment, of course, is a childish reference to President Obama; conservatives seem to think the president is inarticulate without access to a teleprompter and find that wildly amusing.

I should mention that Rep. West is a former Army Lt. Colonel who served in Iraq. He’s familiar with the military justice process. After an incident in which he terrorized an Iraqi police officer, West was fined US$5000, removed from command of his unit, and reassigned to a rearward detachment while his resignation from military service was processed.

Let me also say that although I vehemently disagree with West and his politics, I completely understand what he did in Iraq and why he did it. By normal moral standards, his behavior was egregiously wrong; by battlefield standards, it was illegal. But it may have actually saved the lives of his men.

Again, if you don’t want U.S. troops to do horrible things, don’t send them to war. If you send them to war, you MUST hold them to high behavioral standards—but it’s critical to remember that war can brutalize even the most decent of people.

Anybody who is really interested in this topic would do well to read With the Old Breed: At Pelelieu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge. Sledge was a nice, bookish, religious Alabama boy who served with the U.S. Marines in the South Pacific during World War II. His account of the brutalizing effects of war is shocking and appalling, and quite possibly the best memoir ever written about war.

the world conspires to amuse me

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Okay, first I have to explain why I was in a Starbucks yesterday. No…that’s too complicated. Let’s just say I had good reason NOT to be in my usual coffee dive. But I needed free wifi access in order to chat with the Jamelah and cobble together the new Iron Photographer elements. For those of you who aren’t part of the Utata community, that probably won’t make any sense. I’d explain Iron Photographer and why I needed to chat online with Jamelah, but it’s even more complicated than the reason I was in Starbucks.

I wouldn’t even mention the fact that this happened in Starbucks, but the location is part of what made it so amusing to me. So…Starbucks.

Right. I’d just finished my business (if you can call a chat with Jamelah ‘business’) and I was packing to leave when a middle-aged guy in a nice suit sat down at the next table. Packing to leave takes time when it’s only 17F outside–there’s all that business with the scarf and the hat and the gloves and the coat. By the time I was ready to go, another guy in a suit approached the table where the first guy in the suit is sitting.

I started to walk away. I overheard the first guy in a suit say to the other guy in a suit, “I used to be an accountant like you; then I took an arrow in the knee.”

I was halfway out the door before that sunk in. Then I was out on the sidewalk cackling.

It occurs to me, this will probably only be amusing to folks who have been playing Skyrim. I’d explain Skyrim, but it’s about as complicated as Iron Photographer and why I was meeting with Jamelah and why I was at Starbucks.

Okay, maybe you had to be there. Or maybe you had to be me. Or maybe next time I’ll just put this sort of thing on Twitter. Overheard: I used to be an accountant like you; then I took an arrow in the knee.

In my defense, I did say the world conspired to amuse me. I didn’t say it conspired to amuse anybody else.

pissing on the dead

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There’s a great deal of surprise and outrage over the video showing the members of a Marine sniper unit pissing on the bodies of dead Afghans. The outrage is merited; the surprise is not.

This is what happens in war. We train people to kill other people, which is the ultimate desecration of the body. Why, then, should anybody be surprised to hear troops desecrate those bodies in other ways?

Desecrating the bodies of the enemy has happened in every war that ever took place. It was an old practice when Achilles dragged Hector’s body around the walled city of Troy some 3300 years ago. It’s been practiced by every army that’s ever existed, and though it may violate moral and legal codes of military conduct, it’ll continue to happen. The U.S. military isn’t—and never has been—exempt. The ways in which wars are fought have changed over time, but desecrating the bodies of the enemy is a constant.

Of course our troops have pissed on the bodies of dead Afghans. This isn’t the first time it’s happened in Afghanistan and it almost certainly won’t be the last. Afghans have undoubtedly pissed on the bodies of dead Marines and soldiers, and they’ll continue to do so. Pissing on the body is a quick and easy way to express contempt and mark territory. It’s an expression of war; it’s part of the nature of war.

This isn’t to say we should condone—or even tolerate—such behavior. Those four Marines deserve to be punished, and punished severely. They deserve punishment for several reasons, not the least of which is that desecrating the bodies of your enemies creates more enemies—and more intransigent enemies.

So yes, we must punish those Marines. Yes, we should be outraged by the behavior. But spare me the shock and surprise. If you don’t want soldiers pissing on the bodies of the enemy, don’t send them to war. If you send young men and women to war, don’t act surprised when they behave the way warriors have always behaved.

iowa nice

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Here’s the thing—I like Iowa. I really do. I was born here. It’s true that I’ve spent most of my life living elsewhere, but I’ve always had affection for the state and its people. Iowa is an odd place—not at all the way it’s portrayed in the news and entertainment media. But then, how many places are?

However, Iowa is afflicted by the Iowa Caucus—which has traditionally been the first contest of the U.S. presidential race. That means every four years presidential candidates swarm Iowa like spawning salmon. It also means every four years we have to endure the news media talking about Iowa like the entire state is comprised of ultra-religious corn-fed, cretinous hicks.

We certainly have some of those—but they’re not the majority. They’re not even a significant segment of the population. They’re just noisy and annoying, like those locusts that crawl out of the soil every thirteen years and make life miserable for a bit.

But overall, that’s just not Iowa. So I was delighted to see the following video become something of a hit on YouTube and elsewhere.

I like it. But he had to leave a lot out. Like the fact that the very first case heard by the Iowa Supreme Court was In Re the Matter of Ralph. Ralph was a slave owned by a man in Missouri. The Iowa court ruled that the moment Ralph set foot on Iowa territory, he became a free man. This was 1839—that’s 22 years before the U.S. Civil War.

And he didn’t mention that one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most important free speech rulings was a result of Iowa high school students protesting the war in Viet Nam. In 1965 a group of students wore black armbands to school. They were abused by pro-war students (who were in the majority in 1965), insulted by their teachers, and expelled for refusing to remove their armbands. After their expulsion ended, they returned…without the armbands, but dressed entirely in black clothing.The Supreme Court ruled that students (and teachers too) do not “shed their constitutional rights at the school house gate.”

Which reminds me—Iowa is almost always at the top of the list when states are ranked by literacy. Nearly 70% of all Iowans own a library card. Iowans read a lot—and they’re not just reading the Bible.

I could go on. I could mention, for example, that when same-sex marriage came before the Iowa Supreme court, the judges ruled unanimously that it was unconstitutional to deny members of the same sex the right to marry. That’s right…unanimously. The fact is, Iowa is a pretty liberal state. Most Iowans are pretty open-minded. And they really are, for the most part, nice. Seriously. If you drive down the road and wave to the stranger in the oncoming car, they’ll wave back. And smile. It’s a little weird until you get used to it.

I’m in Iowa again, and it seems I’ll be here for the foreseeable future. But this is the first time in my life I haven’t felt a compelling need to be someplace else. I think I’ve grown into Iowa.

Addendum: Let’s not get carried away by the fact that Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney received the most support from Iowa Republican Caucus voters. There are more than 2,100,000 registered voters in Iowa, about evenly split among Democrats, Republicans and Independents (with a slight edge to Democrats). Santorum and Romney each received around thirty thousand votes out of a voter population of more than two million. It doesn’t mean Iowans are generally supportive of either of them.

a walk along the creek

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The creek is down. That’s how the locals phrase it. The creek is up, the creek is down. They say it like it’s a weather report—and in a way, it is.The level of the water in the creek may not be as immediately variable as the weather, but it changes. There’s usually some warning, but it can change and change radically in a very short time. And like the weather, the change can be savage.

It looks so tranquil, doesn’t it. Right now the water moves so slowly and lazily. There’s not much power behind it; it slides around any obstacle it meets. It moves just enough to prevent ice from forming—though in some small eddies and quiet spots where the water is still, a thin icy layer modestly covers the water.

A few months ago, this was a different creek. A wildly different creek. A few months ago the creek was a brutal bastard, pummeling anything in its path, knocking down trees and driving all manner of rubbish and detritus ahead of it.

The creek overran the banks. That’s such a paltry sentence to describe what actually happened. The creek overran the banks the way the Lakota overran Custer’s 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn. It swept everything out of its way. It dug up stuff that had been long buried on the creek bed, and rattled it all downstream. It just slammed everything out of its way. And then it stayed.

That’s the thing about a flood. It doesn’t just stop. It lingers. It takes days to recede, and weeks before the land is dry enough to walk on. If you look at the trees along this path, you can see the high water mark on their trunks. This path is about twenty yards from the creek bank. It was entirely under about three feet of water.

I walk along this creek every two or three weeks. I’ve done that for at least a couple of years. I walk along the creek and I pay attention to what I see. I know the stretch of creek that’s home to a pair of Belted Kingfishers. I know the places the deer like to cross. I know where the local kids make bonfires and drink beer and do all the things kids probably shouldn’t do but do anyway. I know where to look for weasel and fox and beaver. I know where there used to be an old Maytag washing machine half-buried in the creek bed (it’s gone now, of course—swept away by the flood).

But I never noticed an old Ford Fairlane. I’ve no idea where it came from. It just appeared there after the flood. Whether it was somewhere farther upstream, whether it was buried in the creek bank, whether it was rusting away on somebody’s property—I don’t know. But there it is, like some would-be fossil uncovered by the forces of nature.

The creek isn’t nearly as attractive as it used to be. It’s no longer quite so pleasant to walk along its banks There’s too much crap piled up in the water, too many downed trees, too much damage done.

But its correcting itself. I love that about the creek. All those uprooted trees are useful; woodpeckers find insects in them, groundhogs dig burrows under them, mushrooms grow on them, chipmunks live in them. Given enough time, the creek will even dismantle that old Fairlane. Given enough time, the creek will be lovely again.

There’s something satisfying in all this. Something deeply gratifying. The creek may be ugly in places today—and it’ll remain ugly in places for the foreseeable future—but every day the creek is repairing a bit of the damage. In the spring it’ll probably flood again, and that will cover up or remove some of the debris left behind by the last flood, and the new flood will create a few new ugly places.

I don’t know why that pleases me. But it does.

thinking of this and that on st. stephen’s day

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Today is St. Stephen’s Day, the 26th of December. All I know about Stephen is that he was stoned to death for blasphemy—which seems an unlikely entry on the résumé for a saint. I’m sure at one point I must have known who did the stoning and what the blasphemy was, but it all escapes me now. It couldn’t have been very spectacular blaspheming, though, if they turned the day after Christmas into his feast day.

St. Stephen’s day is the day on which the events described in the Christmas carol about Good King Wenceslas took place. You know the carol—Wenceslas sees a ‘poor man’ out in the snow ‘gathering winter fuel.’ He has a page gather some meat, some wine and some pine logs (why waste good hardwoods on a peasant?) and ‘forth they went together’ to make sure the peasant didn’t go to bed hungry that night. I’ve no evidence to support this, but I’d bet my paycheck (if I had a paycheck) that the page carried the food items and the peasant ended up toting the pine logs. Wenceslas might have carried the corkscrew.

It wasn’t just a coincidence, by the way, that this happened on the Feast of Stephen (assuming, of course, the carol is based on an actual event—it’s not as if there’s anybody out there fact-checking Christmas carols). Christmas was the day set aside for exchanging gifts with equals; Stephen’s Day was for giving gifts to people who were below your social station. It’s the original re-gifting day.

Although he may have been good, Wenceslas was never really a king. He was merely the Duke of Bohemia—which isn’t a bad gig in itself, but it’s hardly in the same league as king. It wasn’t until after he died that Otto, the Holy Roman Emperor, granted Wenceslas the honorary title of rex justus—a ‘righteous king.’ Like St. Stephen, Duke Wenceslas was also a martyr. He was murdered by his brother Boleslav as he returned home from church one day. Anybody who’s ever had an older brother—especially who can do no wrong—will understand the impulse.

I suppose it could be said Wenceslas had the last laugh. After all, nobody ever wrote a carol about good king Boleslav. In fact, he is known in history as Boreslav the Cruel. I suppose murdering your brother is something of a disqualification when it comes to being selected as a subject for a Christmas carol. Still, my guess is that given a choice, Wenceslas would have preferred spending a few more years leading his page around Bohemia delivering foodstuffs to random peasants over having grubby school kids singing about him down the centuries during the holiday season.

Pretty good carol, though.

still talking

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It was 34 degrees Fahrenheit when I gave into the fool notion to take a walk yesterday. I decided to visit the chunk of curbing. It’s been over a year since I first came across it—a small, displaced bit of asphalt curbing around which somebody had tied a length of red PVC wire fashioned into a sort of carrying handle. The bit of curbing had been toted a short distance from its original location—though I’ve no idea why anybody would do such a thing. It made absolutely no sense at all. That, of course, was its appeal.

After discovering it, I returned periodically to the site (an old, deteriorating parking lot that once surrounded a supermarket, but now surrounds the grassy field where the supermarket used to be) to look at and ponder the meaning of the chunk of curbing and the wire. It attracted attention from other folks as well. I never saw them, but the chunk of curbing was moved on at least one occasion.

Since I tend to over-think almost everything (apart from my behavior) I developed the conceit that I was engaged in a sort of ongoing conversation with the chunk of curbing. I looked forward to seeing it, which I realize sounds completely unhinged. But there it is. I’d developed a peculiar fondness for a bit of molded asphalt.

On my last visit—back in October—I noticed somebody had tried to move it again, and the red PVC wire had completely snapped. The chunk of curbing and the red PVC wire were no longer connected. I fully expected the next I visited the lot, the wind would have swept the PVC wire away. The conversation seemed to be over.

But I was wrong.

As you can see, the red PVC wire is still there. Totally divorced from the chunk of curbing, but it’s still there. I’ve no idea why; we’ve had serious wind storms—storms powerful enough to knock down trees. And yet there it is, splayed out slightly differently than before but in what appears to be the exact same spot. The original chunk of curbing, along with a companion chunk that appeared some months ago, seem to have moved again—which is entirely inexplicable and illogical. But against all expectations, the wire and the curbing are still there.

I find that reassuring. I guess the conversation isn’t over yet. I’ll visit again in a few weeks and see what I can see.

i got your sign of weakness right here

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I declare, living in Iowa during primary season is a trial. It seems I can’t go half an hour without hearing Rick Perry’s smug voice proclaiming “Some liberals say faith is a sign of weakness.”

You know what’s a sign of weakness? Making shit up, then suggesting you’re bold for standing up against a claim nobody made—that’s a sign of weakness. It’s also a sign of staggering douche-baggery.

Rick Perry concludes that particular advert by saying “I’m not ashamed to talk about my faith.” Dude, maybe you should be. On account of I think you must have skipped that chunk of the Bible that goes: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in. Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

It doesn’t read I was in prison, and ye came unto me and gave me a lethal injection.

I’m not a Christian, and I’m a tad uncomfortable judging another person’s Christianity. But I’m completely comfortable judging somebody’s hypocrisy and douche-baggery. And no amount of smirking proclamations of faith can cover up Rick Perry’s hypocrisy and douche-baggery.