Indespensible reading:

SEYMOUR HERSH:

"We've been taken over by a cult"

"About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he thinks he’s doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some mandate from -- you know, I just don’t know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren’t voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're going to have.
It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us -- you have to -- I can’t begin to exaggerate how frightening the position is -- we're in right now, because most of you don't understand, because the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon -- by statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before they kill us, as Peter said. “They did it to us. We’ve got to do it to them.” That is the attitude that -- at the very top of our government exists. And so, I'll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can -- you know, there's not much more to go on with.
I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let's all forget this word “insurgency”. It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that started -- they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody told me, it's -- somebody in the system, an officer -- and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me.
There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside -- the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people -- serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been “diminish the agency.” I'm writing about all of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power.
On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can’t win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we’re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There’s no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a “free-fire zone” right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.’s, and he picked up the phone and he said, “Welcome to Stalingrad.” We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it.
We have a President that -- and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper -- when a reporter or journalist asked -- actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up and says, “Yes, they should all have good equipment and we're going to do it,” as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean nothing -- nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, “well, we don't do torture.” We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what’s happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That's into the not the issue is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven “bad seeds”, enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is another framework. We're not seeing it. They’ve gotten away with it.
So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old from somewhere in Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a funeral in Washington, and the Post did a little story about it. They quoted -- his name was Hodak. His father was quoted. He had written to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it was like after his son died. He said, “Today everything seems strange. Laundry is getting done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast. Somehow I'm still breathing and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away.” There's going to be -- you know, when I did My Lai -- I tell this story a lot. When I did the My Lai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that I discovered was that they had -- for some of you, most of you remember, but basically a group of American soldiers -- the analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our soldiers don't see enemies in a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get shot by snipers, because It's always hidden. There's inevitable anger and rage and you dehumanize the people. We have done that with enormous success in Iraq. They're “rag-heads”. They're less than human. The casualty count -- as in Sudan, equally as bad. Staggering numbers that we're killing. In any case, you know, it's -- in this case, these -- a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up -- they thought they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men and they executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit -- the Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch. They collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of kids did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment -- one of the things that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him under her stomach in such a way that he wasn't killed. When they were sitting having the K rations -- that’s what they called them -- MRE’s now -- the kid somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began -- and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill him, “Plug him,” he said. And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn't do it so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his carbine. Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in the back of the head. The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown off. He was being medevac’d out. As he was being medevac’d out, he cursed and everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, “God has punished me, and he's going to punish you, too.”
So a year-and-a-half later, I'm doing this story. And I hear about Medlow. I called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I said, “I’m coming to see you. I don’t remember where I was, I think it was Washington State. I flew over there and to get there, you had to go to – I think Indianapolis and then to Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into the Southern Indiana, this little farm. It was a scene out of Norman Rockwell's. Some of you remember the Norman Rockwell paintings. It's a chicken farm. The mother is 50, but she looks 80. Gristled, old. Way old – hard scrabble life, no man around. I said I'm here to see your son, and she said, okay. He's in there. He knows you're coming. Then she said, one of these great -- she said to me, “I gave them a good boy. And they sent me back a murderer.” So you go on 35 years. I'm doing in The New Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of you know about The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of -- The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for -- you know, these -- some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not -- this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over -- as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly -- over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, “Were you there?” She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes -- the daughter had come home -- before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a -- I hadn't thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows -- she doesn't know about depression. She doesn’t know about Freud. She just said, I was just -- I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn't say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked “Iraq”. She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became -- one of them was published. We published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What we didn’t publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man -- pretty hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. There's another story.
For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of -- you know, we all deal in “macro” in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, “Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?” Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists. Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards -- you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going to -- it's -- I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he’s going to do between then and now is enormous. We’re going to have some very bad months ahead."

Rich countries have decided to control Iraq the old-fashioned way

via Sojourners

Under IMF's Thumb
by Elizabeth Palmberg

A recent study in Iraq found that acute malnutrition in children under 5 has nearly doubled, from 4 to 7.7 percent - that’s 400,000 kids suffering from severe "wasting," often because a contaminated water supply has given them chronic, life-threatening diarrhea. Among their parents, unemployment is rampant. And the desperate economic situation, along with unrestored water and electricity, helps feed Iraq’s violence: When the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) closed down radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr’s newspaper last March, it cited an article accusing CPA head Paul Bremer of "starving the Iraqi people."
Instead of pragmatically working to get the lights, water, and jobs back on, the U.S.-led occupation immediately forced on Iraq what The Economist called "the kind of wish-list that foreign investors…dream of": a smaller government workforce and no taxes or restrictions on corporations importing anything, buying anything but oil businesses, or taking any profit out of the country without reinvesting a dime. One of Bremer’s economic advisers called Iraq "something like the California gold rush and the Wild Wild West combined."
Iraqis could clearly see that such "shock therapy" was a recipe for throwing many people out of work fast. For example, Bremer planned to quickly sell Iraq’s 200 state-owned enterprises (other than oil companies); an estimated 145,000 workers, each supporting an average of five family members, would have had to be fired to attract buyers. (To make things worse, because of its aversion to state-owned companies, the CPA steered reconstruction work away from them. For example, the Green Zone’s cement blast walls are expensive imports, not products of Iraq’s 17 cement factories.) And, as we’ve seen in the example of the former Soviet Union, economic "shock therapy" and fire-sale privatizations can lead to oligarchy, corruption, and stagnation rather than the promised economic boom.
A YEAR LATER, the corporate cowboys have been scared off - temporarily. First, Bremer was unable to sell state industries when trade lawyers pointed out that, as journalist Naomi Klein put it, "Bombing something does not give you the right to sell it." The current U.S.-appointed puppet government could sell government assets, but is prudently refraining from layoffs that could swell the ranks of violent militias.
So now rich countries have decided to control Iraq the old-fashioned way - by using claims of foreign debt to put the country under the IMF’s thumb. The Paris Club (the United States, Japan, Russia, and various European countries) has offered to forgive 80 percent of Saddam’s roughly $39 billion of debts to them - most of it after Iraq accepts a few modest proposals from the IMF. This "forgiveness" is mainly a favor from the creditors to themselves; Russia’s finance ministry candidly called the Paris Club decision a strategy to "transfer this debt from the ‘hopeless’ into the ‘being serviced’ category."
Moreover, almost all of this debt is "odious" - incurred by a dictator who, with the knowledge of his creditors, used the money to oppress his own people. Iraq should not pay it; creditors should know that they lend to dictators at their own risk, not that of the victims.
All this has not stopped the IMF from seizing the chance to call for Iraq’s government to limit spending to "the minimum adequate level of social support." History shows that IMF minimums are low enough to cause needlessly prolonged recessions, occasional riots, and widespread misery.
The United States must not abandon its recent efforts to negotiate debt cancellation for the world’s poorest debtor nations (efforts that were motivated in large part by its agenda for Iraq). In addition, no matter what bad debt deal U.S.-appointed Prime Minister Allawi signs before the upcoming Iraqi elections, Iraq is an opportunity to reexamine the entire debt system and the persistently wrongheaded advice of the IMF, not to mention rich countries’ anemic foreign aid budgets.
The parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25) tells us we are going to be judged based on how we care for the hungry and the vulnerable. If the rich nations of the West do not want to be counted among the goats, they need to become a lot less wild.

Elizabeth Palmberg is assistant editor of Sojourners.

Morgan Freeman/Will Pitt on the MLK Memorial

William Rivers Pitt: Thirty six years after the murder of Dr. King, plans are in motion to build a memorial to his life, his activism and his teachings in Washington DC. Given the days we live in - with war and economic uncertainty and fear served to us with our daily bread - a memorial to a man who preached non-violent resistance is timely. What aspects of the memorial will focus on King's legacy in this regard, and speaking personally, what aspects of Kings legacy in this regard find resonance with you in these days?

Morgan Freeman: Every aspect of this monument seems appropriate for these times. While some are confused and frustrated today with the conditions of our world, the monument offers the tenets of Christ, as Dr. King understood them, to provide calm - the water effects that are part of the design will allow a place for reflection. While storms and earthquakes ravage the land with power that mystifies us, the monument's etched phrases will speak of the peace within one's self - as Gandhi understood it and Dr. King perceived it from Gandhi's teachings. The monument itself - a peace monument to a peaceful man in a valley that has long commemorated great and hard-fought wars and the Presidents of our vast and diverse nation - the very idea of it pulses.

What does Dr. King mean to you? How do you feel about being involved in the movement to establish a memorial for him and his work?

I spent a great deal of time in the South, growing up there as a child in and around Memphis. As an adult, I was very aware of Dr. King's message and how it affected the people who lived in Southern communities. He was a person, more than any actor, more than just about any other statesman of his time, who had 'presence' in the surest form. I believe it was something that was born in him but that he cultivated with resolution because he knew the power that his particular kind of presence could have in the world.

He knew that change was inevitable but that choice affecting change, non-violence affecting change, peace in the midst of change would make the difference. This is a powerful example that he set for us and posterity. Any reminder of the example that was his life is important. In times of war, of heartache, of despair - in the best of times, we need to remember the power of an exemplary life. We need to remember, always, Dr. King's tenets and his life.

Can you tell me about the process involved in gaining approval for this monument, where it will be located, and what the overall concept behind its construction is?

A memorial, long overdue, will be built on the National Mall in Washington. It will be appropriately situated on four acres of the nation's most hallowed ground in a direct line between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. The centerpiece is large a "Stone of Hope," on which the silhouette of Dr. King will be carved, symbolizing his walking out of the mountain of despair. Dr. King's sermons and speeches will be etched into a significant portion of the Memorial. The Memorial will fittingly be situated in the midst of the cherry blossoms, which will be bloom each year on the anniversary of Dr King's assassination.

This memorial project came about from the ambitious efforts of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternities. For over 20 years, the fraternity worked to make this dream a reality. As a result, in 1996, Congress signed an Act authorizing a Memorial in Washington and President Clinton signed the legislation authorizing the building to take place on the Tidal Basin.

The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, AL, has a dramatic monument to Dr. King and his words, as well as a separate monument commemorating those who lost their lives in the struggle for civil rights. Are any aspects of that monument's concept to be incorporated into the DC memorial?

This memorial is distinct in that it is the First memorial honoring a man of peace and will be the only memorial on the Mall not honoring a president or a war. Another interesting point is that The Memorial will also commemorate the contributions of many other people who participated in and gave their life in the civil rights movement. Stone 'niches' will honor those including Medgar Evers and the four children murdered by a bomb blast at a Church in Birmingham. Some of these niches will purposely be left blank to allow for future heroes in the struggle towards equality, peace, and justice.

What else needs to be done for this monument to become a reality? What can people who would like to see this memorial become a reality do to help?

I encourage anyone who has ever benefited from Dr King's actions and words of justice, equality, and peace to learn more about the Memorial. At http://www.buildthedream.org/, you can learn more about the memorial, see the design and learn more about Dr. King as well. To date, the Memorial Foundation has been in a quiet phase, raising $32.5 million out of the needed $100 million. Now, we are kicking the campaign into high gear and calling on all citizens to make a contribution by our 2006 fundraising deadline. Any of those interested can donate directly through the website.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.

Save us from your followers

Yahoo News: Sunday January 16, 5:13 PM
Villagers furious with Christian Missionaries

Samanthapettai, Jan 16 (ANI):
Rage and fury has gripped this tsunami-hit tiny Hindu village in India's southern Tamil Nadu after a group of Christian missionaries allegedly refused them aid for not agreeing to follow their religion.

Samanthapettai, near the temple town of Madurai, faced near devastation on the December 26 when massive tidal waves wiped it clean of homes and lives.

Most of the 200 people here are homeless or displaced , battling to rebuild lives and locating lost family members besides facing risks of epidemic,disease and trauma.

Jubilant at seeing the relief trucks loaded with food, clothes and the much-needed medicines the villagers, many of who have not had a square meal in days, were shocked when the nuns asked them to convert before distributing biscuits and water.

Heated arguments broke out as the locals forcibly tried to stop the relief trucks from leaving. The missionaries, who rushed into their cars on seeing television reporters and the cameras refusing to comment on the incident and managed to leave the village.

Disappointed and shocked into disbelief the hapless villagers still await aid.

"Many NGOs (volunteer groups) are extending help to us but there in our village the NGO, which was till now helping us is now asking us to follow the Christian religion. We are staunch followers of Hindu religion and refused their request. And after that these people with their aid materials are leaving the village without distributing that to us," Rajni Kumar, a villager said.

The incident is an exception to concerted charity in a catastrophe that has left no one untouched.(ANI)

Fear-1952 / Fear-2005

I believe Paul Tillich's thoughts below, accurately describe our current reactive right-wing culture to a tee. It's an interesting glimpse of historic & philosophical proof that we currently exist within a paradigm of McCarthyism II.

And this sequel is NOT a very good movie either. It's even worse than "the original" that Tillich certainly knew.

"There is a moment in which the self-affirmation of the average man becomes neurotic: when changes of the reality to which he is adjusted threaten the fragmentary courage with which he has mastered the accustomed objects of fear. If this happens - and it often happens in critical periods of history - the self-affirmation becomes pathological. The dangers connected with the change, the unknown character of the things to come, the darkness of the future make the average man a fanatical defender of the established order. He defends it as compulsively as the neurotic defends the castle of his imaginary world. He loses his comparative openness to reality, he experiences an unknown depth of anxiety. But if he is not able to take this anxiety into his self-affirmation his anxiety turns into neurosis."

-Paul Tillich (1952), "The Courage To Be", pp. 69-70.

Christmas 2004:

My sister Lisa called me on Christmas Eve,

and the news about Kellie wasn’t good.


Kellie @ Lost Lake, Oregon - July 2004

As a preface here, Kellie was my first love. I met her in 1979 - I was 18, she was 17. Kellie was one of those who could light-up a room the instant she walked in. The night we first crossed-paths, she did exactly that, and I suddenly found myself in this confounded, emotionally-unprotected state of bliss. I kept calling her to go out some night with me, (something I NEVER did back then) and finally, she relented. In no time, we were spending a lot of time together and fell crazy in love. We briefly parted in 1980 when I left Phoenix to attend a Music Conservatory in San Francisco. After a couple of months apart--and a few horrific long-distance phone-bills--came the mutual realization that we missed each other terribly and before really considering any consequences or the magnanimity of what we were doing, Kellie and I were living in a Victorian-flat on the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. We spent a wonderful, exciting (and sometimes tumultuous) seven years together before amicably parting ways in 1986 - off on our separate life directions: Kellie towards motherhood & maturity, and me to a life of music & wayward instability.
We always attempted to stay in touch as best we could which, because of my past lifestyle, was difficult to say the least. I’m happy to write today that over these past few years, we successfully rekindled our unpredictable life-connection primarily as a result of two unrelated occurances of sickness: my own ability to finally address and combat a 15-year drug-addiction and the cancer which Kellie battled with admirable perseverance. Life can be weird that way, I guess.

.

12.24.04
Lisa went to visit Kellie early Friday morning and called me afterwards to say that she believed Kellie was failing fast. She reported that Kellie was severely distended and semi-conscious, though at one point, she did manage to recognize her when she tightly gripped my sister's wrist and said “Lisa”. Kellie’s friend and caretaker, Paul, sent me an email essentially saying the same thing.
I knew this was coming; we all knew this was coming. I'd made a point of taking a week off over the Thanksgiving stretch to fly down to Oakland to spend some time with her. Before heading back home, Kel and I spent an intense, emotional 45-minutes just saying good-bye to one another: we both knew that this was probably it. And over the following weeks, I absolutely knew it was coming, faster and faster, when she was unable to talk to me whenever I called.
Most of Christmas Eve afternoon, I internally fretted about all-things-death. I was subtly preoccupied in hope of Kellie being relaxed and free from pain at her life's end. Kay went on one of her tender-care-watches, worrying about me as well as Kellie. Kay and Kellie grew quite close with each other when Kel came to stay with us for a week in July. Aside from having the common experience of having to put up with me, they were also born on the same day, August 6th, nine-years apart. In some ways, they are eerily similar.
As the day wore on, I became slowly distracted by the Christmas Eve service I was going to play at a Lutheran church here in Portland. Briefly: as a musician, it is one of the tougher "gigs" to play, basically because of the (seemingly) never-ending list of Christmas songs and hymns that everyone knows intimately. It’s a bit intimidating to perform, because even one or two clinks & clunks can seem horribly noticeable, especially to me while in such a perfectionist state-of-mind. And really, no one in church cares about my sporadic slip-ups anyway, (and I already knew this fact going in; they are a forgiving bunch) but such was my mindset this evening - unsettled and emotionally scattered. It was a beautiful night at church regardless.
When I returned home, Kay, Bridget and I commenced to opening gifts we had expertly culled for each other from the myriad of American-consumer-oriented possibilities. We were all happy, grateful and loved, and listened to some fantastic new CD's reaped from this particular harvest. Thinking about Kellie, who was simultaneously fading from life within these exact moments of time in which I was gratefully experiencing life, was way-too harsh for me to hold onto in thought. I ran from such thoughts and drifted off in an "Animal-Collective" musical-trance on the couch and eventually stumbled into the bedroom and literally collapsed into bed.

12.25.04 (Morning/Afternoon)
With no blood-family here in Portland, Christmas can be one of those rare days of rest and hibernation that Kay & I can share - something we don’t get to do very often and thus, look forward to taking advantage of. I woke up very late that morning, 9:30, (I'm usually up by 6:30) feeling tired and spent, primarily from playing the aforementioned Christmas Eve service.
So, when Paul called and gave me the news that Kellie had finally passed at 8:01-Christmas morning, I wasn’t all that surprised. But I still felt this sudden pang of emotional-shock. I had expected upon hearing news of Kellie’s death that I would somehow feel some kind of relief, but in fact, I came face-to-face with the reality that I had only been fooling myself. And I got a little irritated at myself for this. That’s the trouble with expectations: they can sometimes morph into premeditated resentments. I felt numb and sad. I thought about Kellie’s kids, Bethaney, Claudia and Doo-dah having to survive Christmas every year with their Mom's death in the recesses of their minds.
It came to be this year that everyone in my family was gathered together for the day at Jacque's place in Forestville. This was in large part due to a surprise visit from Mom. It was kind of a relief that I only had to make one phone call to tell everyone Merry Christmas, that I loved them, and that Kellie had passed.
Kay spent some time hard-crying - emotionally busting down the Prozac-brickwall she so vehemently resents, which according to her, usually isn't possible. Kay and I worried aloud about Kellie's youngest ones (Claudia and Doo-dah) being raised by Kellie’s ex, who is not very popular in most of Kellie’s friends’ houses. As the day waned, I wanted to turn off the TV-show of hurt & suffering that was endlessly broadcasting in my head. It seemed that it got dark outside much too early and it also started raining very hard.

12.25.04 (Evening)

Kay and I drove 40 miles in a hard-rain to St Helens for Christmas dinner with Randy & Marcie, who are the closest thing I have to “blood” family here in Oregon. Randy had also taken the news hard. We reminisced about the crazy life that Randy, Judy, Kellie and I had made while living together at 1445 Oak St #5, across from the Golden Gate Park panhandle.
It was a laid-back and somewhat somber dinner. We continued to worry about Kellie’s kids and Christmas being such a horrible day for her to die. We cursed cancer. We tried to make some sort of sense out of these recent life-lessons of love, death, relationship, the past, time, fear, and all the rest. Merry Christmas.
As Kay and I drove home, it started raining even harder. The windshield-wipers were on max-speed and it was still difficult to see. I can’t remember a darker night.
A quarter of the way home, in Scappoose, we heard the thud-thud-thud of our flat tire. Fortunately, it happened right in front of the only open gas-station in town. We were very lucky that it didn't happen a couple of miles further down the road, which would have been in the middle of nowhere, in torrential rain and pitch-black darkness.
I was too tired and emotionally-drained to be upset. After jacking up the car to change tires, I discovered that the tire-iron required for loosening the lug-nuts was missing. Kay went inside the station’s mini-mart to see if the two cops drinking coffee and doing nothing (because after all, it was 10:30 on a dark, rainy Christmas night) would loan us a tire-iron from the police-car.
The cops couldn’t loan us their tire-iron because, “we might possibly turn around and use it to hit them over their heads.” And still, neither Kay nor I became upset: it had already been a long day of riding an emotional roller-coaster. And as stupid and lame as their excuse was, it had that tinge of the current American cultural, fear-based logic to it: I might be a terrorist. All right...I get it. So instead, one of the officers gave us the phone number to Grumpy’s Towing who inturn, after some discussion over the phone, agreed to dispatch a tow-truck to come rescue us.

So there I was: the late Christmas-night of Kellie’s death, inexplicably standing beneath a two-foot wide awning, watching this onslaught of rain pouring from a menacing, black sky while waiting for some unknown tow-truck driver to make it possible for us to make it back to Portland.
Because of the relatively safe, opportunistic (and dry) sanctuary of our flat-tire locale, Kay was making correlations to Kellie and angels watching over us. Frankly, it was hard for me and my battered mind to get there, but indeed, there he was pulling up: a tow-truck driving angel who came from out of a warm house on a nasty Christmas night just to help Kay and I get home.
When he hopped out of his truck, I instantly judged him to be some sort of giant, rural-hayseed who was probably out to get some city-folks money. (Maybe I really was upset and cynical after all.) My opinion faded quickly though: tow-truck savoir-man had a real authenticity in his voice and actions. He absolutely would “fix our tire for us in a couple of minutes.”
Our angel was 6-foot-something and built, and he had a very kind face, with a gentle smile that I’d never quite seen on someone clad in black-smeared, oily-overalls. He removed the flat-tire and had it swapped with the smaller, emergency spare within five minutes. The whole time he was wrenching and turning and wiping, we were making small talk around our holidays. His was "pretty nice and kinda low-key", spent with his wife and kids and a tasty honey-glazed ham. I started feeling guilty for dragging him out of his house. In return, I told him about Kellie passing and how her kids now had Christmas as a constant-reminder of their Mom’s death.
"You know,” he said to me while lying on wet, dirty pavement and fumbling with something I couldn’t even fathom that was lurking within the wheel-well, “that's one-a-them glass half-full or half-empty deals." I stood by silently listening. "Sure, it’ll be hard on her kids these first few Christmases…(he stopped and winced for a second as he finished tightening one of the lug-nuts) …but I think it's kind of neat that every Christmas they'll have an opportunity to remember their Mom until the day they die themselves."
I was stunned. I was speechless. I thought I was going to start crying right there, in front of this giant, oily tow-truck angel whose glass was clearly, half-full. He finished up while tightening the remaining nuts: "Now, a religious person might say that God took your friend on a very special day because she was a very special person." (I'm pretty sure our tow-truck angel must have been a religious person.)
I was just flabbergasted. “You’re right,” I replied somewhat sheepishly. He smiled his tow-truck angel-smile back at me. I thought about my Dad, and thought I was going to start crying again.
And he wasn’t quite done: our little emergency-spare was low on air as well, so he filled that up too via his tow-truck-angel-air-compressor. “It’s a lucky thing you weren’t out there halfway to Sauvie Island,” he said, easily winning my daily ‘understatement of the day’ contest.
I attempted to regain some of my composure by discussing our financial business that was now at hand. “I don't know how to thank you, my friend,” I told him. “Although there is American currency," I joked, "so, how much do I owe you?” He rubbed the side of his chin in a gesture of contemplation and said with a slight smile and sigh, "Hey…Merry Christmas...no charge."
I probably don’t need to tell you here that my tears officially could no longer be contained. They had begun their slow-leak. I insisted on giving him twenty bucks, off the meter. Breakfast or something for his family, I dunno.
"That's mighty kind of you sir," he smiled. And off we went on our separate ways. As he left, I noticed that our angel's tow-truck was adorned with Elmo, Grover, Big-Bird and other well-known Seasame-Street characters. I imagined his children laughing and playing in his truck, (as it sat idle at home during the day) crawling around the big drivers-seat and pretending to drive and rescue their own stranded travelers. Kay and I cried most of the way back to Portland. I couldn’t hold back my well-constructed dam of tears any longer.
I’d be lying to you if I said I knew exactly what this particular December 25th, 2004 meant. I don’t know today. I'm guessing that I won’t know tomorrow. I don't know what to make of the kind of events that can transpire in places like Scappoose, Oregon at the end of a long, grieving Christmas day.
I don't know if it was some kind of final good-bye from Kellie, or a sign of God’s benevolence, or tow-truck driving angels, or just empathetic human deeds, courtesy of the last few stragglers leaving Christ’s annual birthday party. I’m not sure how a stranger's random act of kindness on a rainy Christmas night can transform one's tears of sorrow and uncertainty, into tears of love and hope.
Maybe the poet Rainer Maria Rilke knew this when he wrote:

"For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."