A Past Alive In This Week's Headlines

This week, I've seen two news stories that illustrate how, even with all of what is going on in the world, people are fascinated with parts of the past that somehow remain a source of fascination:
1.) Pirates off Somalia
Granted, these aren't the sort of dashing Johnny Depp pirates we might envision when we hear the word, but these guys are the real deal. After all, the open sea is a very, very lonely place, and it wouldn't take much for even a small gang of armed men to take over a ship many, many times bigger than the one they left from. This week, however, the pirates upped the ante by taking over an oil tanker full of crude oil – a first in any part of the world. From what I've read, the oil tanker's crew are being treated well, as most hostages taken by these pirates seem to be well cared for. However, I can see this changing, and I'll give you a historical example as to why.
In the First World War, and in parts of the Second, German U-Boat crews would often surface and give warnings to the crew of the ships they were going to sink. They would give them time to take to the lifeboats, and would sometimes even radio in a distress signal to make sure help arrived.
However, as the war went on, the merchant ships became more and more heavily armed, and would often attack a submarine that surfaced top attack it. So, with this in mind, the submarines would attack without warning, and the whole idea of helping the crew of the sunken ship went by the wayside. So will it be with these pirates. The more heavily armed the opposition becomes, the worse the victims will be treated by their captors. I'm not saying that these pirates don't deserve what they get, but people should read the writing that's already dripping from the wall: this is just the beginning, and pity the poor crews who may find themselves as "guests" of the pirates in the future.
2.) Hitler HAD only got one ball.
The British newspaper Sun reported this week that a former Imperial German Army medic confessed to a priest, shortly before he died, that he treated then-Corporal Hitler for World War One injuries that resulted in the loss of one of his testicles. It serves as confirmation for what the English thought for years (as evidenced by the nursery rhyme "Hitler has only got one ball/ The other is hanging on the wall") What makes this interesting is that Hitler has been dead for (checks calendar) 63 years now. It is interesting to me how much a character of fascination he remains to people. I admit; I'm one of them.
Now, let me put this out in front: there is a vast difference between being "interested" in something and "actively condoning it." But that said, Hitler remains very much an enigma even after all of the books I've read about him and Nazi Germany. Usually, evil is somewhat simple to explain away: Saddam Hussein and Josef Stalin were simply bad men who took it out on others. But for some reason, Hitler remains an aloof and detached historical figure. I suppose it makes sense; the people who were closest to him said they never really got to know Hitler as a man, so why should we find any sort of insight through second- and third-hand accounts?

The past, contrary to what some think, is more than musty pages on a library shelf or a dusty exhibit in a museum. It's alive - as these stories illustrate. Pirates remind us that, despite our technical mastery of the world around us, problems from the era of Julius Caesar still remain. Hitler's one ball medic confession reminds us that memory serves us better than we think; we remember that the actions of one man can ripple across both the world and the ages.
Even if he's only got one nut.

A corresponding target value

I think it’s a telling sign that Barack Obama gave his Nov. 4 acceptance speech from behind three inches of bulletproof glass.
Being a leader holds with it a corresponding “target value.” Four presidents have been assassinated during America’s existence, and while the reasons vary, the presidents all had one thing in common: they were simply ordinary men who reacted in the way that many men do when they are shot: they bled, they suffered, and ultimately died from their wounds. It’s a natural thing for any leader to be a target – but I don’t think I’ve ever been so worried about a presidential assassination before. Obama, to many in the white nationalist and supremacist community, represents the sort of pan-international-multiculturalism they abhor, and the fact that he is black only adds to the anger.
News articles like “White Supremacist Rage Boils Over After Obama Victory” (Marketwatch.com) are indicators of a large (and potentially well-armed) portion of the country who are not exactly happy with our new C-in-C. The Anti-Defamation League posted samples of some comments from white supremacist websites in “White Supremacist Rage.”

-David Duke: “I really believe tonight [Nov. 4] is a night of tragedy and sadness for our people in many ways…[we’ve lost] the fundamental values of the United States of America…the country is not recognizable any more.”
-“A person using the screen-name "KOS" declared, "America will become another third-world shithole like Africa if it is run by people like Barack Hussein Obama and other minorities." Another extremist, posting as ‘Himmler SS,’ wrote, ‘America [sic] flags should be flown upside down as the international symbol of distress.’”
-On White Revolution, ‘Fallschirmjager173’ claimed that ‘the recent election of a negroid as president of America, was brought about by dumbed down white traitors, to this nation." An anonymous poster made a similar comment on Hal Turner's blog: ‘Congratulations to all you f-cking sleeping mesmerized race traitors who just made the United States a 3rd world country filled with Illegal Mexicans and f-cking N-ggers who will run free and have a N-gger commander and chief looking over their shoulders. You all make me f-cking sick. I have burnt the American flag in my front yard.’”
- This wasn’t posted on a white supremacist site, but I thought it was telling. Ted Nugent: “I was in Chicago last week, I said, ‘Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these, you punk!’ Obama, he’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on my machine gun!”

I don’t write about these statements lightly, or because I in any way agree with them (I most vehemently do not). But my point in bringing them to your attention is simply to make the observation that there is a lot of hate out there, and the consequences of an Obama assassination would be simply mind-boggling. I believe it would make the late 1960s race riots in Watts look tame in comparison. I remember making the comparison to Bobby Kennedy when Obama received the candidate nod, bitterly noting that he might have a chance “if they let him live long enough.”
The hate stirred up by a bitter election does not simply vaporize once the ballots are counted. No, for every attack ad we watch, for every act of slimy innuendo and distortion we witness, our decency is slowly eroded. I know there are many people out there stewing over what they see as a defeat for the warped racial ideals they may have, and I fear for my president-elect’s safety in a way I’ve never feared for any public figure’s safety before. Obama has great promise ahead of him, but surely he must realize that he’ll be spending his every moment looking over his shoulder, wondering not only if, but when, the hatred might somehow work itself free.
I do not envy him.

What happened to the Post-War Dream?

The house was like many others on the block 61st block of Third Avenue in Minneapolis. It was older, built post-war, and had withstood the test of time, as the aged trees in the front yard and cracking paint in the windows could attest to.
Looking beneath the faded yellow siding, I could see cracks developing in the concrete foundation of the house, and it made me reflect that it was an anonymous representative of what I am considering to be the decline and fall of the American post-war dream. We’re not the first to go through it; England went through it during the 1980s, as evidenced by the 1983 Pink Floyd album “The Final Cut,” which even has a song on it called “The Post-War Dream.” Now, it seems to be our turn. It was a hell of a ride.
When the bombs stopped falling in 1945, America was the only participant who stood to come out ahead. The industrial centers of Europe, Russia and Asia were damaged or destroyed by the fighting, and the people in those countries were traumatized to varying degrees depending on the severity of the fighting. America, thanks to two ocean borders, was relatively lucky to have not been attacked directly (save for Pearl Harbor, U-boat attacks and the odd Japanese sub shell or paper balloon bomb on the West Coast. Nearly 400,000 Americans were killed in the fighting, which seems a relatively light total compared to those of Germany (7.2 million), Japan (2.7 million) and Russia (23 million). When the war ended, the Americans who served in uniform came home to work, to build, and to raise families. Our neighborhood, built in the 1950s, came so close after this that I imagine that the sweat from war veteran construction workers’ nightmares was barely dry on their sheets. The world, I imagine, seemed a far more optimistic place in the early 50s than it had been just 10 years before. Worldwide conflagrations can sometimes do that.
My wife and I were talking last night about an older woman she met who had traveled around the world, and filled a home with knick-knacks from every continent she had been to. I could not help but envy the time in which she came of age. The Great Depression lived up to its name, but I would like to think that the resulting post-war economic boom and higher standards of living would have been a fitting payoff. As my wife spoke about traveling when we were older and able, I doubted that anyone would afford to be able to travel across the country the way things are going, let alone across the world. I know people who can barely afford to fuel their cars, nevermind their desire the trot the globe.
The pessimist in me thinks we’ve reached the peak of the post-war dream. The harsh reality, put off for so long, is that the standards of living we’ve become accustomed to simply are unsustainable in the long term. I may have been born in a superpower, but I am pretty sure I’m not going to die in one. What I end up seeing in old age remains a unwritten, but I certainly hope it doesn’t turn out as bleakly as the "Mad Max"-meets-Great-Depression imagery that my imagination is capable of conjuring.
Goodbye, post-war dream; you were nice while you lasted.

"The Real America"

At an Oct. 16 fundraiser in Greensboro, N.C., Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin said the following remarks:
“We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.
“This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom.”
While I understand what Palin was trying to say, these remarks anger me. The inference, in case you miss it, is that you aren’t a real American unless you are “pro-American,” meaning that you don’t mind that your phones are tapped and don’t mind that Americans are still being killed in Iraq in a war that was started for dubious and politically-based reasons. Get real, Sarah; contrary to what some in your party may believe, those who don’t subscribe to “conservative values” (which, as far as I can tell, revolve around railing against government spending yet driving up record deficits, and telling “Big Government” to stay out of their lives yet demand passage of amendments to the Constitution that would impact the lives of others) aren’t hoping to see America fail. Speaking for myself, I want to see an America that’s different than the one we’ve seen since G.W. took office.
I want an America where I cam be assured that wars will be a last resort, instead of something dead set on before a president even moves his furniture into the Oval Office.
I want an America where any wars that DO happen will be for good reasons, not ones that later turn out to be wildly false and exaggerated.
I want an America where I don’t have to worry about being spied on for my own “protection.”
I want an America where the wealth is shared from the top down, rather than seeing the ultra-rich get even richer while people like me, in the middle, who see that the only number in their life that doesn’t rise is the number of their salary.
Sarah, I’m a pro-American as you. I love this country as much as you. It’s in what we want to see that makes us different. And if this, in your eyes, makes me un-American, then we’ll simply have to agree to disagree.
Before 9/11, I used to consider myself patriotic. I felt that it was a matter of realizing and recognizing the sacrifices made by those who came before you, and remembering that the freedoms we are given are not given lightly. However, in the wake of everything that has happened since, I feel cheated. I feel as though those feelings ended up being used to generate fervor to approve of things that turned out to be less than true. I wanted to believe that Iraq had WMD. I wanted to believe that we were doing the right thing by making this massive undertaking. I prayed every night before the invasion that this war wouldn’t happen. When it did, I tried to get behind it as best I could. My illusion rapidly fell apart, as it soon became apparent that there were no WMDs, that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11 and that we’d committed to something it was proving impossible to get out of.
So long as I have a conscience, I can’t subscribe to the notion of Palin’s “very patriotic, very pro-American” areas of this country.” Patriots come from all over, in all shapes and shades, and none have completely matching views. It is a narrow mind that automatically separates “dissent” and “patriotism” from each other; the terms are sometimes synonymous.

More than just music

I purged my iTunes library again this weekend, and it’s the latest in a series of add/delete push-and-pulls between the better angels of my nature.
For now, the musical ranks in my 7.7 GB library are dominated by names like Mozart, Chopin and Wagner. I deleted all of my punk and industrial stuff last night while watching “The Sound of Music” with my wife. I’ve added and deleted these types of songs countless times over the past year, and it seems that they end up back there within a week or so. At first, I thought it had to do with music, but upon reflection, I think it had more to do how I’d like to think of myself. I’d LIKE to think of myself as the kind of guy who would like to spend an evening watching “Citizen Kane” with a glass of red wine. In reality, I greatly enjoy watching “Star Trek” movies while eating pudding cups. I’d LIKE to think of myself as someone who can discuss at length the genius of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In reality, I’m more at home discussing the differences between punk music from England in the early 1980’s versus hardcore punk from Los Angeles around the same time.
I am a mixture of conflicting impulses. On one hand, I appreciate righteous anger, and how it can manifest itself in a barking three-chord chorus. On the other hand, I’ve been at best hindered by such anger in the past, and realize that it doesn’t have a place in my future. Classical and choral music calms me. It helps me think in a clear, focused manner, and keeps me relaxed in the sometimes-stressful environment of a newsroom. However, there are limits to the moods it can suit. Sometimes, after an angry day, Nine Inch Nails is the only sound that can tame the savage beast within.
This isn’t about music at all; it’s about me being at a crossroads. I can either proceed down the path of the future, or turn around and head back down the dark path I came in on. It’s an ugly, stark choice, but it seems one that begs to be made with any amount of certainty. The two schools of thought are not compatible; they are fighting for dominance, and control. For now, the better half seems to be winning.
With a CD collection, it’s easy to own a variety of things that you might not be especially proud of (Marilyn Manson, ABBA, etc.) because each CD is its own entity entirely separate from a generic whole. With iTunes, on the other hand, whatever is in the library is a reflection of various facets of the listener’s personality. When I look at all of the ugly on it, it reminds me of the ugly I’ve yet to tame.

Trojan Horse

I thought of an interesting theory the other day. After considering about how odd it was that John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate (relative unknown, pregnant daughter, etc.), I realized that it was a calculated move on the part of the GOP. It is calculated due to several factors. The GOP could never hope to get another governor with a narrow resume (a la GW) and strong adherence to conservative Christian values into the White House without being torn to shreds under the laser-like scrutiny of both the Old and New Medias. The comparisons to the Current Occupant would just be too obvious. To get around this, the logical move would be to keep the actual candidate hidden until the last possible moment. In this case, John McCain would not actually be running for president in the traditional sense - he's merely a Trojan Horse for Palin, the actual candidate who, when the time came, would replace him. McCain is no spring chicken - he could very easily step down for health reasons and no one would bat an eye.
In doing so, he would be turning over the reigns of power to an unknown and perhaps easily shaped president who would probably be more willing than not to bring in cabinet members with their own powerful ideas (a la Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) and own agenda. Palin, from what I know about her, seems close to the sort of conservative GW is. She is, using quotes from her own speech at the RNC, suspicious of the media, pro-drilling, pro-Iraq War and anti-tax. If it seems the attention on the campaign trail has shifted to Palin, it's no accident. Now, it's all a matter of McCain bowing out and letting the real candidate come through. The sympathy generated from whatever "accident" or "health problem" McCain "succumbs" to could take Palin to a sweeping election victory.

I admit, it's just a theory. But it still scares me.

Illusions of Choice

Obama. McCain. Obama. Biden. McCain. Palin. Paul. Obama. Lather, rinse, repeat.
At this point in a ridiculously long election cycle, I’m tired of all of it, and try as I may, I can’t put my heart fully behind any of the candidates. It wasn’t always like this. In 2004, I felt something for the candidacy of John Kerry, because he seemed an intelligent man who offered us something other than what our faux cowboy president had given us. In 2000, I voted Bush because, unlike Al Gore, he seemed to have a personality. I regret that vote. I regret that I didn’t have the foresight to see what could have happened down the road when a blank man who seemed to project whatever we wanted to see in him (as a “compassionate conservative,” whatever that means) revealed himself for what he really was: a dynastic phony with a very narrow band of interest. I used to consider myself a conservative, but that changed in the years after 9/11. I’m not a conservative anymore for the following simple reasons:
1.) The war in Iraq is a poorly planned affair based more on the charisma of the Bush Administration than on the actual facts at hand. The war in Afghanistan, on the other hand, had a clear objective and point.
2.) Our civil liberties are being infringed now more than ever in the name of “our freedom.” What’s the point of trying to defeat our enemy when we become more and more like him with each passing intelligence bill?
3.) A grossly offensive terrorist attack on New York City and Washington, DC. in which thousands died, has been used for political gain ever since.
4.) The very planet we live on is being chewed up and spat out by companies whose foresight seems to be where their hindsight emanates from.
5.) The gap between the rich and the poor grows wider with each passing year.
6.) An American city was left to drown after rampant cronyism proved less than successful at minimizing the damage.
I’m not a conservative. I’m not a liberal. I’m not sure what I am. But I know that I’m angry. I’m angry because my electoral choice this fall isn’t much of a choice at all. Which is worse: voting for someone who you know will screw you, or voting for someone who says they won’t but probably will anyway? Obama, for all of his charisma, is untested. The last thing we need in office after eight years of Bush is another man with a fairly narrow resume. McCain, for all of his fighter pilot heroism (justified, to a point), has been in Washington for 26 years but only now claims that the system is broken. Biden, before he was chosen by Obama, talked a lot of trash about Obama’s lack of experience, a tune that changed markedly once he was picked as vice president. And Palin? A good speech does not experience make. She’s the Republican version of Obama – good at getting people’s passion stirred up, but lacking any real sort of qualifications to make her the next president of the United States.
I’m reading poll figures today that are saying McCain is pulling ahead in the race. How is this even possible? How could Barack Obama, who seemed to have the world on a string a few months ago, have fallen to this point? Why is this even a race anymore? It shouldn’t even be a contest by this point. What does it matter to me? I don’t like either of them. McCain, for all of his “maverick” tendencies, has voted more with President Bush than against him. I’m not comfortable with that. Obama, for all of his rhetoric, doesn’t convince me of much of anything concrete. This Election Day, I’m going to vote for “None of the above.” I’m not happy to have come to that conclusion, but so far, it’s the only choice that makes sense to me.