Even when I was a little kid, I used to love to watch Mohammed Ali box. I'd sit cross-legged on the living room floor in front of my daddy's chair, and we'd watch him outsmart and outbox every contender, from the time he won the gold at the Olympics as Cassius Clay, to the time they took away all his belts and awards when he refused to fight in another unjust and unnecessary war, to when he came roaring back and won them all over again.
We loved watching him spar with network sportscaster Howard Cossell, and I always got a kick out of his mouthing and trash-talking for the television cameras.
Still, I heard all the snide remarks that were made when he became a Muslim and changed his name.
When he first went into a decline with Parkinson's disease, and sportscasters whispered that he'd taken too many blows to the head, he looked straight at the camera and said, "Too many blows to the head? Do you think I'd let anybody get near enough to mess with this pretty face?"
From the beginning of his meteoric rise in boxing, Ali was a cool cat all his own, and from the beginning, he was misunderstood and underestimated.
They thought he was "cocky" and "arrogant" (code-words for "uppity black man"). Talking in rhyme was funny and made good TV, but they weren't really paying attention to what he was saying. And he'd lost some serious fights before facing the formidable George Foreman in 1974. Foreman was a powerful fighter with forearms like cement blocks. He was favored to win--Foreman thought he was going to win, too. In fact, he thought he'd polish off the older Ali fairly early in the fight.
But Ali had done a great deal more than just build up his physical prowess in the gym. He had done some serious of strategizing with his team. And they'd come up with something Ali, in his typical poetic fashion, liked to call "the Rope-a-Dope."
Here is how the fight is described on the "School for Champions" website:
http://www.school-for-champions.com/competition/boxing_ali_foreman.htm
"Before the fight, Ali had been boasting how he was too fast for Foreman to keep up with him. Typically, Ali had set up his opponents through boasting and taunting before a fight. He would make fun of an opponent or predict which round he would knock out the opponent. The press would eat this up.
"Ali's boasting of his speed and the way he opened the first round of the fight with a flurry of punches probably set up Foreman and his corner that Ali would try to win using his speed.
"Foreman and author Norman Mailer claimed they saw Ali's trainers loosen the ropes before the fight. Foreman was not aware that there was meaning to the madness. It is not certain whether it was Ali's idea or the idea of his trainer Angelo Dundee. Most likely Dundee was instrumental in the whole fight strategy, since he was one of the best fight trainers.
"Adjusting the environment is not uncommon in sporting events. National Basketball Association (NBA) teams would often take air out of the game balls in an effort to slow down Michael Jordan. After learning about this, coach Phil Jackson always checked the air pressure of the balls to make sure they were to specification.
"Foreman came out of his corner in the second round expecting a toe-to-toe battle. Instead, Ali leaned back against the ropes and let Foreman flail away at him. He would taunt Foreman to come and get him and then lean back, only protecting his face. This made Foreman angry and later frustrated, as he gave his best shots to Ali's midsection. But the give in the ropes was sufficient to reduce the damage.
"When Foreman did throw a punch at his face, Ali was able to lean back or move his head just enough that the blow missed or had little impact. This was a special skill Ali had through most of his career. He would often hit an opponent while pulling back to avoid a counterpunch.
"Although he primarily used the rope-a-dope technique, Ali occasionally counter-attacked with fast, crisp blows to Foreman's face. Then he would slip back into the defensive mode. In this way, he was controlling the pace of the fight, according to his liking.
"By the seventh round, Foreman had essentially punched himself out. His arms were tired and sometimes hanging on his side. Ali then used his speed and energy to do damage to Foreman, who was just trying to get in one good punch for a knockout. Ali taunted Foreman by saying, "George, it that all you've got?" Foreman realized that it was all he had."
Foreman, in fact, was so devastated by the outcome of the fight that he retired from boxing at the age of 28. Both men, of course, went on to be successful in their own rights and to make an impact on the world in their own ways. But I have been thinking a lot lately about Ali's boxing career and especially his "rope-a-dope" strategy.
And I think it's come to life again, in the Obama campaign.
Obama has taken many body blows during this lengthy campaign, first from Hillary Clinton and her many surrogates, and now from John McCain and his two surrogates, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham. Recently, during the only real vacation he's had in two years, the McCain campaign released a different sneering smear-ad pretty much every day of the week.
And oh! How the pundits pontificated!
And oh! How the Democrats despaired!
And oh! How the polls plunged!
And oh! How the Republicans have gone on being their usual snotty selves.
A grass-roots fire is raging all across the land, that somehow, poor wittle Obama has let himself get beat up by Bad Old McCain. Hillary people are saying, See, we told you so!
It's all over! Forget the convention! Just take the sweaty towel away from the trainer in the corner and toss it into the middle of the ring!
The fight's over!
But, see, all this tongue-wagging really fails to take into account that this political boxer may actually have a strategy of his own. Call it, roping a dope.
All summer, during the early rounds of the fight, most Americans have not been paying that much attention while McCain has landed one body-blow after another. When they do look up, they see a fighter on the ropes, holding up his fists to protect his face, maybe getting in a jab or two in self-defense.
He's weak! they cry. He's getting the crap beat out of him!
But is he? Is he REALLY?
Right now he's got a fortune in the bank, no debt, more money pouring in every month--and while that's going on, he's working hard to unify a party exhausted and irritated at one another after the tiresome primary season. Call it lots and lots of working out at the gym, strengthening those abs so they can withstand the hard punches.
Meanwhile, his trainer stepped in before the match and loosened the ropes--meaning, it may not be readily apparent simply because the campaign hasn't trumpeted it loudly to media far and wide--but hard-hitting Obama attack ads have been quietly playing in swing states all over the country, delivering sharp jabs to McCain. They don't smear McCain's character or make up baseless crap about him or pretend that Britney Spears matters worth a damn to anybody in this country except Britney Spears--but they deliver sharp counterpunches on McCain's weakest policy positions, and they're landing more than a few bruises in the states where the fight hangs in the balance.
Now, after the two conventions--in the last rounds of the fight--McCain's going to have to rely on public financing. Not that he won't be bolstered by the RNC and 527 groups--but he will be facing, during that time, a formidable Obama fund-raising advantage.
And that's not all.
While McCain has been exhausting himself throwing wild punches that attack Obama's patriotism and his celebrity and whatever other body parts he can hit, Obama's organization has swiftly spread out over 50 states, setting up voter-registration drives, satellite campaign offices, signing up more than two million supporters online--and then asking them to do more than just donate. They're being asked to canvass and make phone calls and blog and text-message and circulate Obama e-mails and give their TIME and their ENERGY and their RESOURCES--not just their money.
By the time we get to the last couple of rounds of this fight, Obama is going to come full-on into his own. He will get his strength and stamina from US--all of us out here who are in the ring with him. We will be energized and, to coin a phrase, "fired up and ready to go."
And when that happens, most of the country WILL be watching. They'll see a tired old man throwing ineffectual, wild punches.
And they'll see a fighter in his prime, dancing away from the ropes, landing the knock-out blows.
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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When my son was getting shot at, and his Marine buddies getting blown up pretty much every day in Iraq in 2004-5 and again in 2006, and every day Marines and soldiers were dying and getting maimed in a war that was based on, and continually perpetrated by, a LIE, I had to rely on a number of coping strategies that might seem grim or even unhinged to anyone who has never endured such daily agony for months on end (and repeated, the next year)--dark fantasies on what I would do "if anything happened" to my beloved boy.
One fantasy was what I would do if, after his grisly death, I were approached by a network morning news program and asked to talk about my son for the cameras.
When Dustin was home for his first post-deployment leave, I told him, "I'd say, 'You can take your patriotic graphics and your sentimental music and your tear-jerker story for the folks to weep over their morning cereal before racing out the door to the mall, and you can shove it up your ass.'"
My son nodded in grim approval. He understood what I meant.
Although I completely empathized with the desire of grief-stricken families to honor their child's memory, to make his or her death more than a cold statistic, I believed that they were being manipulated by a cynical media who knew full well that less than one-half of one-percent of their viewers would ever have to undergo the anguish of sending a child off to war--repeatedly--to risk his or her life. It was a vicarious way for their viewers to put a mental check-mark next to the "support the troops" box of their lives before going about the business of utterly and completely ignoring that same war and those same exhausted troops and their stressed-out families.
Another dark fantasy of mine during those days, was what I would do should I be herded in with other bereaved family members for a private audience with my dead son's commander-in-chief.
What I would do, I decided, was refuse to shake his hand, then stare at him dry-eyed and say, "You murdered my son."
This was not just idle fantasy, designed to help me cope with the cascade of daily fear and worry that flooded my system for months on end--it was truly the way I believed. And every time I saw Bush make one of his pompous hypocritical speeches about the "sanctity of human life," I wanted to throw up.
The pro-life movement, I suspected, was highly selective about just WHOSE life it was pro.
Which is why, when I read Frank Schaeffer's incendiary powerhouse blogpost, "Frank! As a Pro-Life Leader How Dare You Support Pro-Choice Obama?" at HuffingtonPost.com, I literally leapt to my feet in instant recognition of a symbiotic soul--even though, technically, we disagree on abortion rights issues. It was as if this Marine dad, a powerful leader of the evangelical Christian right throughout the 70's and 80's and strong John McCain supporter in 2000 who now supports Obama, had read my thoughts and put them into even better words than I could have. And I don't mean just on abortion, I mean on EVERYTHING.
You can read his outstanding post here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/frank-as-a-former-pro-lif_b_119435.html
Because, you see, it takes far more courage for him to express these thoughts than for me, simply because he was a Christian right leader for so long, and now, they consider him some sort of traitor.
So, this is what I read that first brought me to my feet:
"I say this as the proud father of United States Marine. I say this as someone who believes that we should be in Afghanistan where my son served, fought and risked his life for us all. I also say this as someone who believes that when it comes to pro-life issues in the most comprehensive sense, that President Bush, Dick Cheney and the neoconservative/Republican establishment have needlessly killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and over 4000 American servicemen and women.
"I use the words "needlessly killed" advisedly. When you send men and women into an unnecessary and unprovoked war-of-choice for spurious reasons that then turn into outright lies, you've murdered them. And George W. Bush has sanctioned torture, contravened the Geneva conventions, and has lied to the American people about all of it."
What Schaeffer--who makes clear that he is still solidly pro-life--is doing is putting into CONTEXT what it actually MEANS to be "pro-life."
You can't drone on and on about "killing innocent babies" whenever desperate women choose to terminate a pregnancy, and then turn around and ignore thousands of babies who have been killed as a direct result of the evangelical darling Bush's warmongering--not to mention more than 4,000 of American mother's children who died as a direct result of his and his administration's policies.
Schaeffer takes what is normally considered to be a single issue, and broadens it to encompass this entire election:
"There's no point arguing about abortion, capital punishment, women's rights, gender equality or any other issue -- no matter how important -- while the ship of state is being torpedoed by the Commander-in-Chief. We can't afford more of this. Our honorable military can't endure more of this. Our economy can't endure more of this. Our Earth will not survive more of this. Bush and his look alike shill McCain have to go."
In that sense, he is referring to the life or death of our entire planet, which has been slowly burning up while Bush has fiddled away at least a thousand days of his presidency at his Crawford "ranch" and at Camp David. (Not only has he enjoyed more days of vacation than any previous president, but he has also attended more sporting events than any other occupant of the White House.)
Of equal importance to our particular country, is the abuse of the United States military at the hands of an administration who claims to love them--an abuse that has damn near broken it. The army can't meet their recruitment goals, their junior officer corps is abandoning them at record numbers rather than staying to make a career, (as one army major said, "All I have to look forward to is more deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan"), and those returning from multiple combat deployments are cracking up in frightening numbers.
Aren't we pro THEIR lives?
As far as "pro-life" policies, Schaeffer cuts right to the marrow:
"What kind of care do we provide to mothers and children? What is our educational system like? Is healthcare available to all? Do our preschool programs and everything from paternal and maternal leave to the economic well-being of our country come first? Or do we argue about abortion rights while we live lives of such supreme selfish decadence that the nature of our country means that no matter what we do with the laws about abortion life will not be valued?
"The Republican leadership is not pro-life. They are simply against abortion for reasons of political expediency. They are also for torture and military aggression. And they chose a literal executioner for president; a former governor who has more blood on his hands than any other modern American governor; Mr. Texas-sized, Capital Punishment-with-no-mercy-no-pardons hang em' high himself."
This last remark was a shot through the heart for me, as a Texan, because I can still remember, vividly, our esteemed Governor Bush's reaction when Death-Row inmate Carla Fay Tucker appealed for her life on the grounds that she had become a born-again Christian since her incarceration, had married a minister, and had dedicated her life for the previous decade to ministering to other prisoners. She'd been a model prisoner and had accomplished a great deal of good in those years.
With a sneer, on-camera, he affected a high-pitched, whimpering female voice and simpered, "Please, please don't kill me!" and then giggled.
A few weeks later, he denied a stay of execution and she was put to death. It was a horrifying display for any fellow human being to make, but for it to have been our head of state was inexcusable and, to fellow Texans, humiliating.
Schaeffer moves on, to address the aspect of pro-life policies to climate change in this way:
"The Republicans have contributed to climate change by coddling oil companies and car companies and ducking the hard environmental and energy policy questions for thirty years. They have literally sold our country to the highest polluting bidders from the Saudis to the Chinese. Therefore the Republicans have literally risked the ability of our planet to sustain all human life born and unborn. So much for human life values.
"Who will help us to become a nation that values life -- abortion rhetoric aside? Obama."
Then, to my delight, he compares and contrasts Obama's and McCain's appearances before the prosperous evangelical mega-church, Saddleback, and its wealthy bestselling author-preacher, Rick Warren. He points out, one-two-three, how easy it has been for the Republican leadership to manipulate the party faithful:
"The contrast could not have been more clear than on August 16 in the interview between pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church and Obama and McCain. Obama gave real and thoughtful answers, often trying to explore a moral question deeply. McCain offered nothing more than canned applause lines and anecdotes from his tired simplistic stump speech.
"McCain fed pre-programed red meat to the Evangelical faithful who were packing the auditorium, but not much more. He parroted all the 'right' lines about abortion, the same empty phrases Bush, parrots, Bush's father parroted and Reagan and Ford parroted.
"'When does life begin?' asked Warren. 'At conception!' shot back McCain.
"The Evangelical crowd goes wild! See?! That's our guy!
"And where do the tired canned pro-life "correct answers" get us? Nowhere.
"I will be voting for the presidential candidate who seems most authentically exercised about our devastating problems and who is ready to not only address them but to provide the inspiring leadership that will move my fellow citizens and I to do something about our terminal situation. I'll be voting for the man that has also inspired the world more than any national leader in my lifetime."
Then, he makes a smooth segue into the whole national security argument that is supposed to favor McCain:
"There are worse things than America being liked and therefore safer. Would you rather have non-Americans waving our flag or burning it?"
He even sends a flaming arrow through the old patriotism-meme:
"The question is: Who can best help us to the realization of the real American Dream?
"The Republicans only offer consumerism as a debased sort of 'freedom.' This is the freedom of 'me' and 'I.' This is the freedom of pigs rooting at a trough.
"As a born-again Christ-centered believer Obama offers a spiritual vision of life founded on the Sermon On the Mount. It is the freedom of 'we.' It is the same view of freedom that my Marine son learned in boot camp: that the person standing next to you is more important than you are. That concept of freedom is more in keeping with valuing all human life. It will create a climate more friendly to mothers and children."
And finally, Schaeffer brings the argument full-circle: he defines what it REALLY means to be "pro-life."
One of my basic complaints about the whole "pro-life" argument is that it seemed to me that its proponents were mostly pro the lives of blond-haired, blue-eyed babes who could be brought up in proper white Christian homes. A crass sort of blindness was applied to the stark reality: that most abortions took place among the most desperate among us--women of poverty and similar grim struggles who simply had no other choice, and young women ignorant of basic pregnancy prevention methods.
A cold-hearted Republican attitude toward government-as-enemy had shut down any chance those women had for:
1) meaningful, thorough sex education available to those most vulnerable--teens
2) readily-available contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place
3) insurance coverage for contraception to go along with its full coverage of Viagra
4) pre-natal health care for all
5) childbirth and post-natal health care for all
6) paid leave-time from work to care for a newborn
7) affordable childcare upon returning to work
8) universal health insurance for those children as they grow up
And so on. It just seemed to me that the entire movement had a sort of bland denial to the impact their policies would have on the real lives of real women. What Schaeffer does is put Obama's pro-choice policies in the full context of compassion for ALL, and of policies that respect ALL human life:
"As I listen to Senator Obama speak, as I see the selfless altruistic energy he has generated in a whole new generation of young people, as I think about the ethical, caring culture he would like to foster with healthcare for all, a revamped and reenergized educational system that includes the arts, history, poetry and all those things that make life worthwhile, as I think about the wars my son's brothers-in-arms are still mired and dying in because of the hubris of the Republicans, as I think about the crying need to restore our standing in the world, as I think about the scandalous way in which the Republicans have manipulated people, including the most sincere Evangelicals, Orthodox and Roman Catholics, to get their votes, while not actually doing anything about the issues they care most about, yes, I am ready to for a change.
"In Obama's America arguments for compassion for the unborn and all the other 'least of these' will resonate regardless of Obama's stance on the legality of abortion. Roe is not the point. Our hearts are the point. The unborn like everyone else will do better in a country that puts people, the earth, and our future ahead of greed, oil company profits and jingoistic rule by fear.
"I will be voting for Senator Obama and am fighting for his election because I am pro-life. "
I could not have said it better myself, Mr. Schaeffer. Thank you for your courage.
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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You know who the Slytherins are, don't you?
For the two or three of you out there who honestly don't know anything about J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, let me briefly explain.
The school, located in a magically hidden castle in Scotland, is divided into four "houses," named for the school's four founders, and all first-year students are sorted into the houses their first day at Hogwart's, where they will remain their entire school career. Each house has its own traditions and character, and those selected are said to possess those same characteristics:
Gryffindor: known for their "daring, nerve, and chivalry" as well as bravery, is the home school of Harry Potter and his friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.
Hufflepuff: known for being very hard workers and for being "just, loyal, patient, and true." (Harry's friend, Cedric Diggory, who competed with Harry in the Triwizard championship, was from Hufflepuff house. He was killed by Voldemort, the Dark Wizard, but more about that later.)
Ravenclaw: known for their intelligence and wisdom, the Ravenclaw's are "those of wit and learning, and a ready mind." Harry and Ron took Ravenclaw girls to their first big Hogwart's dance.
And then there's Slytherin: About the best that can be said for Slytherins is that they are "cunning" and "use any means to achieve their ends." Harry's biggest enemy at Hogwarts is Draco Malfoy, a snot-nosed Slytherin who makes Harry's life hell from his first day, and his Slytherin baboon buddies, Crabbe and Goyle.
The Slytherin founder had, several centuries before, broken away from the Hogwart's school because he wanted to admit only "purebloods" into the academy--meaning, those born to a proper witch and wizard. He would have hated Harry's dear friend Hermione, because she was "Muggle-born," meaning, her parents were neither witch nor wizard. Some students had one parent who was witch or wizard and one who was not, but any not completely pureblood were, over time, derisively referred to as "Mudbloods."
The powerful Dark Wizard Voldemort, who had attempted a takeover of the magical world and the Ministry of Magic (the government of the magical world) when Harry was a baby--(killing Harry's parents and causing the famous lightning-bolt scar on Harry's forehead)--had been aided in his evil by a dedicated cadre of enablers known as Death-eaters.
The Death-eaters worked in stealth, secrecy, and hiding. By day they went about their regular lives in the magical world, but by night, they stalked and killed people they considered Mudbloods, or people thought to be less than loyal to Voldemort. Nobody really knew who were Death-eaters and who were not, although there were uneasy suspicions. (Think of it as a magical Klu Klux Klan.)
But it was not until Harry's fourth year, when Cedric was killed in front of him, that he learned that Draco Malfoy's father, Lucius, was indeed a Death-eater. Lucius was rich, attractive, charming, and highly influential at the Ministry of Magic. He was greatly respected in the magical world, which was one reason Draco was so full of himself.
Now, you're all caught up. So, let's do some movie-casting of our own, shall we?
Voldemort, played by Karl Rove
Lucius Malfoy, played by John McCain
Slytherin house, played by conservative Republican operatives, and the RNC
Are you with me now?
Voldemort/Rove has held great power in the past and wants to hold it again. But in this version of the story, he puts forth Malfoy/McCain as his shining foil. And he enlists the aid of the Death-eaters/Republican strategists of the Slytherin house, to make it all happen.
Their target is Harry Potter/Barack Obama.
In the actual Harry Potter story, Harry is a bright young shining star, a real celebrity in the magical world, because he, and he alone, stopped Voldemort more than once, and survived a direct attempt on his life made by the Dark Wizard himself. Up until the Triwizard Tournament and the death of Cedric Diggory, Harry had been a hero to Hogwart's and to the magical community as a whole.
But when Harry comes back from his encounter with Voldemort, holding Cedric's lifeless body in his arms, he tells the shocking story that Voldemort has returned in full power and wants to take over the magical world again.
But nobody wants to believe him. They are all afraid of Voldemort and want to believe that he is dead, so the Ministry of Magic takes an official position that Harry is not to be believed.
They start by attacking Harry's credibility in the magical-world newspaper, the Daily Prophet.
And they do this by MOCKING Harry. Every week, throughout the summer break before Harry's return to Hogwart's for his fifth year, the newspaper runs one story or another that mocks Harry as an attention-seeker, a show-off, a celebrity-hound who only wants to be famous. He is accused of making up the return of Voldemort in a sensationalistic bid for attention, and poor Cedric's death is explained instead as a "terrible accident."
By the time Harry gets back to school that year, even some of his closest friends from Gryffindor doubt his story, and none more than Draco Malfoy, delight in making fun of him and pretending that he is, after all, just another boy, that there is nothing whatsoever that is special about Harry Potter after all.
By now you probably wonder what the hell any of this has to do with the 2008 presidential election, unless, of course, you have a magical mind.
Because there is a great deal of similarity in Rove's tactics.
John McCain's biggest problem right now is within his own party. The conservative "base" that so famously delivered the White House to Rove and Bush/Cheney twice before, is lukewarm toward McCain. Many of them openly despise him. Voting blocks that have always been solidly reliable for Voldemo--I mean, Karl Rove--such as Christian evangelicals, the military and veterans, and the working class--are fragmenting and fading away.
Before, Rove could engineer huge voting turn-out in those blocks by placing on the ballots wedge issues in their states, such as gay marriage, anti-abortion legislation, color-coded terror frights designed to make his man Bush look strong on national security, and so on. He could whip those bases up into a frenzy of support for his candidate by turning them out at the polls to vote on those issues, and by sleight-of-hand magic designed to make Bush seem as if he really gave a flying damn about any of that.
But Bush and his enabling cronies have done such a catastrophically bad job ("Heckuva job, Bushie," said my moderate Republican husband, who is voting Obama)--that even the party faithful are no longer so loyal. Demographics are changing.
When you can't find a job because you can't afford the gas to drive around looking for one further away than a few miles and you might lose your home; when you have to choose between medication and food; when your loved one is being deployed for a third time to an endless and pointless war while John McCain votes against benefits for the troops and veterans--there's only so much magical myth and illusion that can be drummed up to convince people that this is what they want four or eight more years of.
So Voldemort/Rove has designed a Slytherin Strategy to make Malfoy/McCain the Minister of Magic/President.
And Voldemort doesn't just want to beat Harry Potter, you know. He wants to DESTROY Harry.
Karl Rove regards any political opponent as an enemy to be destroyed.
So instead of coming up with two or three hot-button wedge issues, he's going for spell-casting of a more subtle kind. And here is how he's doing it:
Target: Christian evangelicals:
Run ads that are, on the surface, "fun" pieces designed to make fun of Obama's celebrity.
Calling Obama "the One," and interspersing his image with that of Charlton Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea, followed by soft yellow light glowing against a stairway to Heaven while, in the background, a foreign crowd of thousands is chanting his name, is a deliberate attempt to cast Obama as the anti-Christ.
I knew it the first time I saw the ad. I said so to family and friends. Most of them looked at me like I was more than a little nuts and at least as paranoid as some right-wingers, but go visit http://www.Cafepress.com now and see if you can't find mugs and T-shirts depicting Obama as the anti-Christ.
Not all evangelicals will be convinced, of course. Being a Christian evangelical does not automatically make you stupid. But Voldemort/Rove isn't trying to convince them all, all of the time. He's just trying to raise enough reasonable doubt in enough minds that when they get into the voting booth, they'll lean toward the candidate that they REALLY don't trust:
Malfoy/McCain.
Target: the Bigot Vote
Ask any person of color what the status of bigotry is today, and most likely they will tell you that it has gone largely underground. For example, legally, you can't be refused a job or an apartment because of the color of your skin. That would be against the law. But a prejudiced prospective landlord or employer can reject your application for all sorts of reasons that will cover their ass but keep you away.
Bigots have code-words, too. Ever since they started getting into trouble for saying the "n" word, they found another word just as good, the "M" word.
I asked my sister, who I like to call a recovering right-winger, and who is a strong supporter of Barack Obama (it was my sister who first gave me a copy of THE AUDACITY OF HOPE, for a Christmas gift, two whole years ago)--to explain what the hell is going on with this obsession to turn Obama into a closet Muslim terrorist.
Here is what she said in an e-mail reply, reprinted here with her permission:
"Those of us who walked door to door and campaigned not once but twice for the current regime are so devastated we are making up lies to make even some resemblance of what we did RIGHT.
"ALL of the B.S. about Obama being Arab-American is a HUGE smokescreen for 'we don't want no n--r in the White House,' period. In a world of political correctness we must sell the factoids and justify our outrageous allegations by blaming the 'public enemy #1: the terrorist'...when indeed the true enemy sits high on the hill living off our tax debt for eternity.
"His (Bush's) power is so great he has convinced us that the media is to blame for everything wrong with America...when in reality the rich get so f-king rich they don't need 'government' anymore...Alas, (with) Halliburton and Exxon/Mobil--we set ourselves up for this.
"Obama shines a light on the fact that we must look into the reasons behind the decisions, but oh hell no, this won't do. We must feed the American public media blitzes to deny his right to express his American opinion 'cause he ain't no 'merican.'
"Truly if the Republicans let anybody pay attention to his speeches, they would see how just and right he is. We can't have that. We have no way to disprove the facts he knows to be true. So we will call on our Rednecks and alert the white collar mullet population of the south to 'stick to the war hero kind of man,' not elect one of the 'brothers.' We all know you can't call him that, so we did the next choice in line: Arab, or Muslim...God knows we can't trust them people.
"I get about 10 e-mails a day defaming Obama, everything from the anti-Christ to so much percentage of his blood being Arab, to 'white wanna-be.' They are effectively reaching a huge population of under-informed people. And there are a lot of people who honestly feel that they can't be patriotic and hate Bush.
"I can only hope that the true Americans will see the 'light' of Obama and vote him in. God bless us if we don't!"
I was surprised at my sister's anger at her old co-horts. In many ways she is still conservative, which I completely respect. But her honesty revealed something I hadn't realized about the Slytherin Strategy: That since the bigots of the world are now denied the "n" word, it's okay to use the "M" word.
But Malfoy/McCain and Voldemort/Rove are too sneaky to come right out and accuse Harry/Obama of being a Muslim. Instead, they wave their wands over him with an "otherness," spell--of not putting his country first, of being "foreign," and so on. But it all boils down to the "n" word, and the bigots of the world get it.
After all, they all know what Mudbloods are.
This gets a few more apathetic voters to the polls. Maybe not to vote FOR McCain, but rather AGAINST Obama.
More Messages for the Bigots:
*The black man is "uppity." He was being "presumptuous" by visiting with foreign dignitaries who invited him on his European and warzone tour. He was "too presidential."
When Malfoy/McCain, however, called up the president of Georgia and said, "We are all Georgians," and his campaign staff landed his plane early and raced to place him at the podium on the tarmac making a statement to the world about Russian aggression before even the president of the United States had yet spoken publicly, and now McCain promises to send his own little personal envoy to Georgia...well, there was nothing "presumptuous" about that!
After all, we all know white men can't be uppity.
*The black man is going to seduce your white daughters and make off with your white women, and if he gains power, he will bring other black men into positions of power who will do the same thing.
This was the clear message of the "Hot Chicks Dig Obama" ads. All four of the women who made comments on-camera about how sexy they found Barack Obama, were white.
And in the first ad accusing Obama of being a celebrity--he was not compared to, say, Will Smith, another famous African-American. Will Smith is, after all, popular all over the world and respected for his work ethic and his high-quality movies, and his personable, approachable personality. But it wasn't Will Smith's face superimposed on the ads. It was empty-headed white women celebrities known more for their sexual exploits and irresponsibility than for their talent and hard work.
Voldemort's Evil Spells:
The Dark Wizard, whose familiar is a giant, evil snake, often ensures loyalty of followers by casting spells on them that cloud their minds and cause them to do things they would normally never do.
The only wizard in the entire magical world powerful enough to deflect Voldemort's spells was Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He was Harry's mentor and protector, shepherding Harry through his training until Harry was ready to defeat Voldemort.
(For our purposes, we'll make Dumbledore a composite character, made up of many Democratic strategists, congresspeople and senators, statesmen and women, retired military officers, and so on, who have aided and advised our own hero, Barack Obama, from the beginning of his meteoric career.)
In Rove's favorite method of spell-casting, every single ad run by the McCain campaign that lists statistics and claims about Obama, are flat-out lies. They are usually immediately debunked by major newspapers--the next day.
But many people do not read major newspapers. They get their news in soundbites--either from ads like those, or from glances at the broadcast news while preparing dinner or online during their lunch hours.
And Voldemort/Rove knows that, if an ad is released just in time for a news cycle, (even on just the Internet), that it will be replayed endlessly on news broadcasts before journalists have checked out the truth of the facts, then repeated so often on morning news programs, that by the time the truth does come out, the lie has already saturated the consciousness of the viewer.
The spell has been cast.
By then, the viewers already believe the lie. A whopping 12% of Republicans and Democrats stubbornly persist in believing Barack Obama is a Muslim, and even when told to their faces that he is a practicing Christian, they say, "I just don't believe it."
The Slytherin Strategy
In the Harry Potter saga, Voldemort did not make a full comeback right away, because in the beginning, he was very weak. He gained power over time by casting spells, reinvigorating the Death-eaters, and by helping to turn the hero Harry Potter into a figure of ridicule and--eventually--a threat to the community.
But Harry Potter won in the end, and Voldemort was not only defeated, but destroyed, the Death-eaters scattered, killed, or ruined.
How did he do it? How did Harry Potter vanquish the evil genius Voldemort?
Dumbledore's Army
By Potter's fifth year at Hogwart's, the Ministry of Magic had decided that, since their official position was that Voldemort was merely a figment of Harry's overblown imagination and not really returned at all, (a position backed up and emphasized by Lucius Malfoy and other Death-eaters who ran the government, and aided and abetted by the magical media), then Dumbledore was forced out as Headmaster of Hogwarts, and the students were told that they would no longer need to learn Defense Against the Dark Arts.
In other words, they didn't need to know spells and charms of their own for self-defense in the fight against Voldemort and the Death-eaters, because such a threat supposedly no longer existed. This was just what Voldemort wanted: lambs to the slaughter.
Harry, of course, and his pals Hermione and Ron, knew better. And so, it turns out, did many of Harry's old friends--especially from Gryffindor house, and those who had known and loved Cedric Diggory, and so on.
So Harry's friends came to him and said that, since he was the only person in the entire magical world who had fought Voldemort and escaped death from him and his Death-eaters--not once, but several times--then even though he was still young, still a student, and still an object of ridicule in public--nonetheless, THEY trusted him.
And they wanted Harry to lead them.
So, in secret, a couple of dozen of Harry's supporters began to meet, so that he could train them in ways to resist Voldemort and the Death-eaters--not just resist, but survive, thrive, and overcome.
The students called themselves, "Dumbledore's Army."
You, me, Voldemort, Malfoy, and Dumbledore's Army
Lately I've been reading a great deal of huffing and puffing from commentators and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum, complaining that Obama just has not been fighting back hard enough against Voldem--Rove's attacks.
And Lord knows, Malfoy/McCain has been preening around--lots of flags, lots of "presidential" settings, lots of bustling about with the Georgian president.
But Obama's strategists retort that, most of those political armchair quarterbacks are not privy to the campaign's true strategy, their timing, or their plans to take on the Death-eaters. In effect, they are saying--as Dumbledore did many times to an anxious Harry--be patient. Timing is everything.
(One of the joys of rereading the Potter books, is knowing now, what Dumbledore knew, and seeing with fresh understanding WHY he waited to tell Harry all that Harry needed to know to eventually defeat the Dark Wizard.)
But Dumbledore died in Harry's sixth year at Hogwarts, and did not live to bring Harry through his most excruciating challenge against Voldemort.
In the end, it was up to Harry. But Harry didn't do it alone.
When the great war finally broke out, in Harry's final year at Hogwart's--call it the full-on, post-convention fall presidential campaign--all of Dumbledore's Army, all the volunteer students who had trained with Harry and supported him and learned from him--turned out to fight the Death-eaters, using the defensive skills Harry had taught them.
And in the great climactic battle scene, it was kids and adults, students and professors, parents and warriors--who all turned out to fight alongside Harry. They took the tools Harry had given them in their training, and they vanquished evil.
Barack Obama started out as a community organizer. One of the most brilliant strategies of his campaign, from the primaries to now--has been to organize communities of supporters ALL OVER THE COUNTRY, from the bottom up, in a true grassroots movement the Democratic party has not seen in a very long time, if ever.
With a click of the mouse, you can undergo training. You can learn valuable skills for one-on-one campaigning, and when the time comes this fall, you can receive a list of registered voters and phone numbers FROM YOUR OWN NEIGHBORHOOD that you can call.
And in this small town--I never leave the house without wearing my Obama buttons, or T-shirt, with my Obama sign clearly displayed in my car window. In this conservative Red State area, that provokes questions and conversations wherever I go. So far, in fact, mine are the only ones I've seen, but to my surprise, in talking to people, I have uncovered far more quiet support than you might suspect. I always remind them to vote.
This is the genius of the Obama campaign. For now, you can go to http://mybarackobama.com and get together a list of Obama supporters in your area and sponsor all kinds of events like house parties and canvassing drives.
Right now it's up to Dumbledore's Army--meaning, Obama's supporters and volunteers--to speak out to their neighbors, their friends, their relatives, and their e-mail list--ambassadors for Obama, laying to rest the lies put out by an unscrupulous campaign, and easing those nagging little doubts.
In the magical world, you use a charm to deflect an evil spell--so use charm with people! Smile when you talk about Obama. Call it our own little Defense Against the Dark Arts.
In my own case, I have right-wing friends on my e-mail list. If I think they are genuinely interested in hearing about Obama and are considering maybe voting for him, I answer all their questions. But if it is clear that they are Death-eaters and not the least bit interested in doing anything but arguing and arguing and arguing, then I tell them that, we agree to disagree, but I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who won't listen. We're still friends, but we don't discuss politics any more.
However, those I know who are undecided, who are disgruntled Republicans or Hillary supporters wavering about McCain, or anyone who I think is genuinely interested, then I provide links to sources that set the record straight, and answer all their questions in a respectful manner.
Right now, I constantly remind my young friends in their 20's to make sure they are registered to vote, and I provide links or offer information explaining how. When the time comes, I'll text them and remind them to vote.
For elderly or shut-in friends, I'm available to take them to the polls. I even have elderly friends who do not have Internet access, so what I do is, I print up copies of my blogs and snail-mail them to them.
As what you might call an Obama's Army warrior, my job is to persuade, not to provoke.
This is how we fight the Voldemorts of the world. Instead of spending all our time attacking our own Harry Potter, (or arguing bitterly because we REALLY wanted the brilliant Hermione Granger in Harry's job)...we need to join together WITH him, and expend that same energy speaking out for him, training with him, volunteering, and fighting for him.
Because in the end, although Dumbledore's Army stood with Harry all the way--It was Harry, and Harry alone who had to face down the Dark Wizard Voldemort and slay him.
It will be Obama who must fight McCain. It will be Obama debating him, Obama inspiring his own army, and Obama's own personal Dumbledores devising battle strategy.
There does come a point when, in the final analysis, the rest of us have to trust him.
(Not everybody agreed with everything Harry did, either. He spent as much time arguing with Hermione and Ron as he did confronting Death-eaters.)
But when that time comes, it's up to us to fight for him and for the things that, as Democrats, we hold dear, that have been so deeply threatened by this miserable past eight years and is held in the balance right now.
We can't afford another eight years of Voldemort running this country.
Because the only way evil--the evil of bigotry, prejudice, warmongering, lies masquerading as smiling charm, fear-peddling, environmental heedlessness, and the like--can be defeated is when we join together to fight it.
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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Guys, I wrote about this same topic back in May, but over at HuffingtonPost.com, I've been so annoyed at a trend I've seen of a blogger-who-shall-not-be-named, who keeps getting caught up in veteran's groups' enthusiasm when McCain speaks to them, and then assumes that they all support and will vote for him.
So I decided to speak out and explain that just because a veteran admires and respects John McCain's SERVICE; that does not mean he or she also respects and admires the man's RECORD, and that support for Obama is much stronger in the military sector than most civilians grasp.
Here is the link to my HuffPo:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deanie-mills/bikers-may-love-mccain-bu_b_117225.html
if you'd like to get into the mix over there.
You can also pick it up at TPM Cafe, if you like:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/deanie-mills/
And here's the post, if you'd rather stay put:
If you follow the general storyline put forth by a mainstream media star-struck by a war hero, or simply observe the reception John McCain often receives at rallies held at veteran's organizations, it's very easy to accept and believe that all veterans everywhere practically worship John McCain. I've noticed this especially true of people who do not have a military background -- they often confuse enthusiastic support for McCain's SERVICE as support for his RECORD.
Troops cheer the man, the story goes, therefore they must want to vote for him. Veterans get teary-eyed and salute the flag when he appears, therefore they must be McCain supporters.
McCain's a war hero; he's got the military vote sewn up. Obama didn't serve, so he can kiss the military good-bye.
I have read this assumption in op-ed after op-ed, in blogpost after blogpost, even in commentary posted on blogs. It was especially glaring after Gen. Wesley Clark tangled with Bob Shieffer on CBS's, "Face the Nation," and Shieffer expressed dismay that, because Clark was critical of McCain's position on such things as the new G.I. Bill, that he was "denigrating McCain's service."
My husband, brother, father, brother-in-law are all Vietnam vets, and another brother-in-law recently retired at the rank of brigadier general of the U.S. Army special forces. (My dad retired from the Marine Corps at the rank of Master Gunnery Sgt.) My step-dad was retired Air Force and my sister did a hitch in the Air Force.
My son did two Marine Corps combat deployments to Iraq, (including the grueling Battle of Fallujah in Nov. of '04); my nephew did three combat deployments to Iraq with the Marines, and another nephew recently returned from a 15-month Iraq combat tour with an army Stryker Brigade -- part of Bush's troop escalation last year. Yet another nephew has done one deployment to Afghanistan with army special forces and is currently deployed in another part of the world.
For the first three years of the war, we had five Mills family members on active duty, and until my nephew's return from Iraq last month, we had a close Mills family member deployed to Iraq every year since it began in 2003 -- sometimes two at once.
I have spoken out against the Iraq war from the beginning and started blogging on it during my son's second deployment to Iraq, with his full support. Though I don't get paid for it, I've made it pretty much my full-time job, writing about "the troops" and the effects of repeat deployments on their health, sanity, and family life, and trying to end this godforsaken war.
I am often surprised at how little the civilian world truly understands the military mind. After virtually an entire generation at peace (not counting the Gulf War, which ended practically before it began), there are people in their 20's and 30's who have no concept of military life beyond what they see in the movies or on the news.
For one thing, military types don't all march in lockstep anywhere except on the drill field. Some are conservative, some liberal, some in-between, and some don't care either way -- pretty much like the rest of us.
Military men and women everywhere appreciate courage under fire, period. I'd say that most all active-duty military and veterans greatly admire John McCain's service and the sacrifices he made as a POW. So if he comes to speak to them, they are going to leap to their feet and applaud him, cheer him, and listen respectfully to him speak. They might even try and get a photograph with him.
They are not, however, all going to vote for him.
For one thing, every single Iraq vet with whom I have spoken tells me that the one thing they want in a new president is an end to the war. Period. Whichever candidate comes closest to pledging to end that war, that is who has their support. And right now, that's Obama.
Even during the primaries, no other candidate, with the exception of Ron Paul, received as many active-duty campaign donations as Barack Obama. Paul, you may recall, also wanted to end the war.
Now, there are some active-duty and veterans who support McCain, of course, and would like to see him elected, and will vote for him and donate to his campaign.
But not nearly as many as you might think.
As Jon Soltz at VoteVets pointed out once: There is a difference between supporting a veteran's service and supporting his Senate voting record. And a large majority of veterans DO NOT support McCain's record.
But don't take it from me. Let's start by reviewing percentage-point ratings given by veterans groups of both presidential candidates, based on a minimum of 14 senatorial votes cast on issues ranging from additional inpatient and outpatient care of veterans to safety equipment for the troops deployed to Iraq to increased funds for improvements to veterans' health care facilities.
(It should be noted that the most junior senator, Barack Obama, was not in the senate yet during some of the votes counted, and yet still scored higher than McCain on veteran's issues.)
Disabled American Veterans
Key Votes--McCain 28%
Key Votes--Obama 92%
Vietnam Veterans of America
Key Votes--McCain 37%
Key Votes--Obama 92%
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
Overall Grade: McCain D
Overall Grade: Obama B
My thanks to T Partier, who posted this at Talking Points MemoMarch 26 of this year
More damning is a piece put together by VoteVets.org, "Senator McCain's Real Record on the War in Iraq," on February 8, 2008.
This is a compilation of quotes given by McCain over the course of the war in which he not only insists that it will be over quickly, but praises Bush and Rumsfeld for the fine job they're doing, and quotes year after year after year in which he insists things like, "We're going to win this thing or lose this thing within the next several months." (November 2006)
It's fascinating reading, in light of his recent reversals from maintaining that our troops can remain in Iraq a hundred years or more to his sounds-better-to-voters idea that the war will be "won" by 2013--just in time for his reelection. (Sounds suspiciously like Richard Nixon's promise that he had a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam by the end of his first term.) -- even though he's quoted on September 16, 2007, saying that "I believe to set a date for withdrawal is to set a date for surrender."
In other words, if a Democrat pulls out troops, it's SURRENDER. If McCain pulls out troops, it's VICTORY.
Got it?
But what caught my attention about the VoteVets piece -- is that, not only did McCain vote against adequate rest time for troops who've served multiple 15-month deployments, but that he was one of only 13 senators who voted AGAINST adding $430 million for inpatient and outpatient care for veterans.
Even as he has consistently voted to prolong this war year after year after year at tens of billions of dollars every week, putting unimaginable strain on the troops, who are returning with terrible injuries that require all kinds of care, including traumatic brain injury -- the war's "signature injury" -- which has overtaxed a system completely unprepared to handle the overload of patients from a prolonged war... even so, he begrudges them a measly $430 million bucks, which would be about one day of war-costs.
The most thorough analysis of McCain's war and veteran's votes that I've found so far was posted at DailyKos on February 28 of this year.
Along with voting against adequate troop rest or any end to the war whatsoever, McCain also
** voted against an amendment that would provide $20 million to the Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA) for health care facilities.
** voted against $430 million (mentioned above) for outpatient care and treatment of veterans
** voted against increasing veterans' medical services funding by $1.5 billion
** voted against creating a reserve fund to allow for an increase in veterans' medical care by eliminating abusive tax loopholes
** voted to TABLE an amendment by Senator Dodd that called for an additional $322 million for safety equipment for forces in Iraq and to reduce the amount provided for reconstruction in Iraq by that same amount
** urged other senators to TABLE a vote (which never passed) to provide more than $1 billion for National Guard and Reserve quipment in Iraq related to SHORTAGES in helmets, tents, bullet-proof inserts, and tactical vests
** voted against increasing the amount available for medical care for veterans by $650 million
And of course, even though an overwhelming majority of senators approved Jim Webb and Chuck Hagel's landmark update of the G.I. Bill, John McCain not only opposed it, but he also refused to cast a vote at all. He was one of only three senators who did not vote that day. (One of the others was Ted Kennedy, who'd just got out of the hospital after being diagnosed with a brain tumor.)
McCain's excuse? Fund-raiser.
Attitudes of troops toward the Iraq war has most notably been cataloged in a powerful survey taken by the Center for a New American Security of 3,400 active-duty officers from all branches of the military service, and published in the March/April of '08 issue of Foreign Policy.
Here are a few quotes:
These officers see a military apparatus severely strained by the grinding demands of war. Sixty percent say the U.S. military is weaker today than it was five years ago. Asked why, more than half cite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the pace of troop deployments those conflicts require. More than half the officers say the military is weaker than it was either 10 or 15 years ago. But asked whether "the demands of the war in Iraq have broken the U.S. military," 56 percent of the officers say they disagree. That is not to say, however, that they are without concern. Nearly 90 percent say that they believe the demands of the war in Iraq have "stretched the U.S. military dangerously thin.
A full 80 percent of the officers surveyed did not think that the U.S. was in a position right now to handle another war. When they were asked to rate their confidence in the U.S. presidency on a scale of one to ten, the officers gave Bush a rating of 5.5 -- higher than the civilian world rates him but hardly a ringing endorsement.
One of the biggest misperceptions I've seen of civilians toward military is that they assume that military-types are always gung-ho for war.
I can tell you right now that the only troops I've ever seen "gung-ho" are young teenagers on their first deployments who have not yet been asked to fight. I have never, ever spoken to a combat vet who WANTS to go to war or wants to return to fight. Yes, there are some, but the vast majority, those who know the true costs of war first-hand, have no desire to glamorize it.
The survey bears that out. In spite of the fact that Republicans love to paint Barack Obama's emphasis on diplomacy as well as political solutions over military as weak or soft or inexperienced or naive, the truth is that, quote:
Nearly three quarters of the officers say the United States must improve its intelligence capabilities--the highest percentage of any of the choices offered. Active-duty officers and those who have retired within the past year give a much higher priority to nonmilitary tools, including more robust diplomacy, developing a force of deployable civilian experts, and increasing foreign-aid programs.
Again -- in line with Obama's positions -- military officers surveyed repeated that modern warfare is, by its very nature, guerilla warfare and cannot be won by conventional warfare methods. Time and again those surveyed emphasized the importance of increasing our special forces, who are trained in a much different kind of skill-set than the average infantry troop.
Special forces troops go into a hot situation in groups of no more than a dozen. They are usually bearded and dressed in local garb. At least one of them speaks the language fluently and the rest have a rudimentary grasp of it. It is their job to get close to the power-broker of the area, be it a warlord, sheik, or gang leader -- and broker a trade of some kind that will, essentially, rat out the true terrorists.
This has been done successfully with regular ground troops in the Anbar province of Iraq, and is very similar to what SF does all the time. My brother-in-law did much of this kind of brokering with Bosnian warlords, and before he retired, was flown into Afghanistan to repeat the success he'd known in the Balkans.
Repeated deployments have damn near ruined the junior officer corps of the military, with even a historic high of 58 percent of West Point officers quitting the military as soon as their commitment ends, rather than staying to make a career of it.
In other surveys, military families have also soured on the Iraq war an want it to end -- something like 60 percent of them.
These are all issues that concern the military. Do they leap to their feet and cheer a man who held up under five years of enemy torture in a war? Absolutely.
But do they vote for him?
It depends upon how well they know his record. Those who understand that he has voted against veteran's issues far more frequently than for them, will not vote for him.
Cheer for him? Yes.
Vote for Barack Obama?
Probably.
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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In security expert Gavin de Becker's landmark book, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence,
http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Fear-Gavin-Becker/dp/0440508835/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217537227&sr=1-1
he uses several illustrations to demonstrate how our survival instincts often try to protect us even as we try to over-rule them with logic and reasoning, and how we should learn to trust our instincts over what even other people may be trying to tell us otherwise.
One example he uses is of a woman about to enter an elevator. There is one man on that elevator, who is clean-cut and nicely dressed in a suit and tie, but for some reason, a great unease sets in and she decides to wait for the next elevator. That elevator contains three youths dressed like goths who look at her with a surly expression, but she gets on that elevator anyway and the ride is uneventful.
Her eyes and her logic told her that the first elevator would have been the safest, but her instincts were warning her that the man was not what he appeared. Her instincts also perceived no threat from the rowdy teens on the second elevator. Her instincts were right both times.
In Chapter Four of the book, "Survival Signals," de Becker spends a couple of pages discussing the difference between someone's BEING charming...and someone who deliberately USES charm in order to manipulate.
The most famous example with which most of us are familiar is the infamous serial killer and law student, Ted Bundy. Bundy was young, handsome, intelligent, clean-cut, and a sociopathic stalker of women he then murdered and desecrated after death. One of his most common techniques for getting the women to go with him was to wander around a university library with his arm in a sling, carrying books. When his target woman left the library, he would follow her as if he, too, were leaving at the same time. Then he would make a big show of dropping the books and fumbling noisily to pick them up with one arm.
Inevitably, the women would offer to help him, and, using all his considerable charms, he would ask her if she would mind terribly putting the unweildy stack of books into his car for him? The one parked right in front? The inocuous Volkswagon beetle?
Then, as she leaned into the open car door, he would toss off the sling, shove her into the vehicle, bounce around into the other side, and take off, punching her into submission.
And the first thing the hapless victim would realize is that there were no door handles on the insides of the car doors. And no back seat.
What de Becker wants his readers to understand is that not everyone who is charming is really all that charming. Many of them are using charm as a manipulative tactic. Their ultimate goal is not to be liked by you so much as to be able to use you for their own purposes.
This has, ironically, been a complaint lodged by the media against Barack Obama. From what I can tell from my reading of the matter, they base this accusation on three things: (a) the size and enthusiasm of his crowds (b) the fact that his opponents have accused them of being caught up in his "spell" and not being objective and (c) the fact that, on the campaign plane, he does not very often hang out with them, joking and chatting. Rather, he tends to use that time to withdraw into a quiet space of his own making, sheilding himself from interruptions with his ipod and reading through a formidable stack of memos, newspapers, and books that keep him informed and up to date on current events.
Not at all like, say, John McCain, who is notorious for all the freewheeling access he has given the media through the years, not just on his so-called "Straight-Talk Express" campaign bus but also at just about any venue the reporters choose to question him about anything.
And oh, the funny stories he tells!
And oh, the long-winded answers he gives to all their questions!
And oh, what a GREAT GUY he is, this John McCain!
Why, he's just charming, really.
So charming, in fact, that at a press dinner introducing the two nominees earlier this year, McCain was given a gift of his favorite coffee--which of course, the reporters well remembered, what with all that coffee they drank with him themselves--but when they introduced Obama, they "accidentally" referred to him as "Osama."
So...let me see if we can analyze this a bit...Obama is to be under suspicion because he is so well-liked on the campaign trail by potential voters but does not joke around and drink coffee with reporters and tell funny stories and give them complete and unabridged access. So they don't trust him, somehow.
But McCain, on the other hand, who had "used charm" endlessly with his "base"--the press--that...let me see here...Oh! We can let that gaffe go. We know McCain didn't really mean it. Old guy gets cranky at the end of the day. And oh! Let's not worry too much about THAT gaffe because, hey, everybody makes mistakes sometimes. And UH-OH--looks like he made a real boner on CBS news...could even cost him the election, and is that really fair? No, no. What we'll do is, we'll splice together an EARLIER response from a different question...like so...THERE. That's what he REALLY meant to say.
He's a charming guy! He goofs up sometimes but he's a good sport about it! Laughs about it with the press pool later! Not like that elite snob Obama who spends all his free time reading up on the latest economic and foreign crises to face this country.
Yeah...that guy's not really charming at all. We like the goof-off guy better!
Besides, he's a WAR HERO! And we all loooove John Wayne.
This is what I see happening...but all is not lost, dear Reader, because the truth is that, when someone USES charm as opposed to BEING CHARMING, then what happens is, over time...the mask slips.
Obama is pretty much Obama pretty much all the time. He gets irritable when he's tired, like the rest of us. But he doesn't "fly too high to the sun" on a good day and he doesn't despair on the bad days. This has been borne out now by many many people who have campaigned closely with him for months upon months now. Basically, his nature is calm and his temperament steady. He seldom even raises his voice.
Obama does all that reading on the plane because he has no other time to do it, and when he DOES take questions from reporters, he knows his information has to be accurate or they will pounce all over the slightest gaffe and pontificate on it endlessly for the next week or till the end of the campaign--whichever comes first.
But McCain is not charming all the time. McCain is only charming when it will get him something. He figured out long ago that if he used charm on reporters, he could fool them into letting him get away with the fact that he is pitifully uninformed on the most pressing events and issues of our day. He knew that by using charm on them, he could cast a spell of his own, that would give him tremendous leeway in a campaign.
People who have known and worked with him for years describe quite a different John McCain than the affable guy drinking coffee with the press pool.
Even in HIGH SCHOOL, they called him John "McNasty."
This is because, underneath all the flag-waving rhetoric, he is not a very nice person. He is, in fact, mean-spirited, vengeful, and has a titanic temper that has become legendary on the Senate floor. Go through recorded comments from fellow Republicans when he was running for the nomination in 2000, and you will see many who dreaded the thought of a McCain Oval Office. They worried about what a man with a hair-trigger temper would do when he had his finger on a real trigger.
This nastiness came in handy during his time as a prisoner of war. It made him resist and spit back in their faces whatever his captors gave to him. I take nothing away from that courage.
But I think his nastiness hides an underlying rage he's had in him all his life; resentment, maybe, from being expected to go to the Naval Academy and be an admiral just like dear old dad and granddad. He graduated 894th out of a class of 899, and says himself most all he did was raise hell. That's fine, we were all hell-raisers in college. But what I'm saying is that the image and the mythology that has been constructed around McCain from his earliest days in politics, and the idea he's given the press of his personality from his strenuous use of charm, does not in any way present the real man behind the mask.
Ask Nancy Reagan. She has scarcely spoken to him since he dumped his wife, (a good friend of the Reagans) who'd been disfigured in a car wreck during his incarceration, and three kids, to chase after and marry a beautiful millionaire heiress half his age less than a month after the divorce became final. Within a few months of that, he was running for congress as a charming war hero, bankrolled by his gorgeous young trophy wife.
His own party bemoans what a bad candidate he is, because, unlike another politician who knew very well how to use charm to hide an underlying nastiness--George W. Bush--McCain doesn't know how to stick to the party line. When they try to make him do it, his mask begins to crumble. He grimaces. His smiles are thin-lipped and mean. And when he's set loose, he says all the nasty things that, traditionally, surrogates like Karl Rove have done in his place so that the rest of the world can go on thinking he's such a nice, charming man.
And as the mask begins to slip, what I think is beginning to happen now and what I believe will happen increasingly, is that the instincts of the American voter are going to warn them that this is a man who is using charm in order to manipulate them into giving him what he--and the Bush administration wants--a third Bush term.
The press is going to persist in saying that it is OBAMA who is "using charm" on the American people and that they should be suspicious of that, but as the campaign drags on and they see more and more of the two men reacting to daily stresses and campaign strains, I think the truth will begin to show itself to those who have learned to trust their instincts.
Their logic and reasoning--and press reports--may tell them, hey, this guy's a war hero and we're at war; he's all experienced and everything; and gee, he's such a NICE GUY.
But as the mask slips and they realize that experience does not equal wisdom and that no matter how charming a man may seem, if he can't stop making gaffe after gaffe after gaffe then it must mean that, really, he does not know what he is talking about, and that, furthermore, if he SAYS one thing but DOES another...how trustworthy is that? I think their instincts will tell them that something does not add up.
It might take a debate or two to prove it. After all, Obama had to go up against the likes of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards on 22 separate occasions. Who did McCain debate? Mitt Romney? Ron Paul?
As stated recently on Talking Points Memo, (and I've lost the link, but it was at TPM Cafe), a politician who does not make gaffes is one who knows the issues well--this is why Hillary was so good on the trail and why Obama sailed through Europe and the Middle East without giving the press something to trumpet ad nauseum. The one who constantly makes word mistakes is one who, frankly, really does not know the issues that well.
We've had quite enough of that over the past eight years, thank you.
McCain has made so many mistakes on the trail that he is even corrected for them on-camera by those traveling with him. So far, he's gotten away with it because of his skillful use of charm with the media.
Even his sad, "disappointed" voice that he uses when lacerating Obama is part of that charm, that "niceness" that has fooled them when they rush to give him his talking points straight-up, with no examination of the truthfulness of those charges.
Bill Clinton used to always say that the American people had a great deal of common sense, which was the reason his popularity remained high no matter how much he was slimed by Republicans. The voters were CONSTANTLY told not to trust him, and yet they did.
And they were rewarded for that trust with a balanced budget, a surplus, the end to genocide in Bosnia without the loss of a single American life, gas at a buck and a half a gallon, and eight years of peace and prosperity. This was the Clinton legacy.
The Bush legacy? A ten-trillion dollar debt ceiling, a half-trillion dollar national debt, four-dollar gasoline, two wars and thousands of Americans and innocents dead, a historic mortgage crises casting thousands out of their homes, a corrupt and politicized justice department, disfunctional government...I can't go on. I really can't.
I also think that, beneath it all, the American people never really trusted George W. Bush but voted him into office because of a case of collective post traumatic stress post 9-11 that was goaded and egged on by the fearmongers in his administration. (Plus, they stole Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. But I digress.)
I don't think the voters will fall for Rovian tactics again. Shock therapy has snapped 'em out of their PTSD. And frankly, they're pissed.
I'm thinkin'...over time? In spite of being told over and over not to trust the black guy with the big smile but instead, the craggy-faced and charming old war hero...they'll go with their instincts.
As for the press? Well, I think coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war pretty well proved that the press, by and large, has long since lost touch with their own instincts.
Maybe it's time they learned something from the rest of us. |
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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For the past few weeks, as Barack Obama has moved to solidify his nomination among the party faithful while, at the same time, reaching out to the most crucial voting bloc of 2008--Independents and disgruntled Republicans--I've watched the Democratic Party begin to split upon its usual ideological lines, much as it did, say, in 2000 and in 2004.
At first, I tried to find one word to sum up what Obama is trying to do, as well as one word to describe the thousands of angry Democrats who have risen up in righteous indignation at what they consider to be an ideological betrayal over such issues as the recent FISA bill.
So I went to the dictionary and looked up: PRAGMATIC.
It said, "concerned with the practical consequences of actions or beliefs."
Practical consequences. Of actions or beliefs.
But I wanted one word to sum up what that meant, so I went to the Thesaurus online, which provided its own definition of the term: "having or indicating an awareness of things as they really are."
THINGS AS THEY REALLY ARE.
Hmmm. Interesting. The Thesaurus listed such synonyms as: "down-to-earth, hardheaded, matter-of-fact, practical, tough-minded, unromantic."
Yes, that makes sense. A pragmatic person takes an unromantic outlook on life and deals with things as they really are. That is not to say that a pragmatic person does not dream of things as they can be, but he or she knows that, in order to bring about change, it will have to be done incrementally. Baby-steps, if you will.
Pragmatically.
This is because human nature recoils at the idea of dramatic change all at once. Most people consider dramatic change to be threatening to the social order upon which they depend. When dramatic change is threatened--as we saw in the '60s--most rank and file people react by doing such things as electing Richard Nixon president, if for no other reason than he promises to keep things as they are.
Yeah. That about sums it up.
So then, I wanted to find a word that would describe IDEOLOGICAL.
Because it seemed to me that the opposite of pragmatic is ideological--when one puts his or her ideals above pragmatism, standing on principle, as it were, to the expense of all else, in order to make a grand point or gesture.
So I asked my online Thesaurus to provide synonyms for "ideological."
And it was stumped.
It said, "Do you mean...ILLOGICAL?"
In other words, to an online provider of synonyms for most words in the English language, the best it could do to come up with a word that meant the same thing as "ideological" was "illogical."
And this is perfect, actually, because right now, we have what may go down as the MOST ideological administration in this country's history, and there is none, believe me, that has ever been more illogical.
(Even Richard Nixon's.)
But I kept digging because hey, words are my life. I found a word that seemed close enough to "ideological," so I decided to see what kinds of synonyms were listed for IDEALISTIC.
Yes, someone who is ideological is, by definition, idealistic. It was, after all, highly idealistic for George W. Bush to actually think that if he basically forced democratic elections on violent third-world countries that somehow they would come up with Thomas Jefferson for a president or prime minister. Instead, in Palestine and in Iran, to name a couple, they elected the most violent extremist candidate on the roster.
Oops!
So I looked up the definition of "Idealistic," and came up with this: "not compatible with reality."
In other words, if you are highly idealistic in your politics, your views are most likely not compatible with reality. Synonyms include: "quixotic, romantic, starry-eyed, unrealistic."
Which brings me to Ralph Nader.
Ohhhhh, how soon we forget, eh?
That's the problem with revisionist history.
Although I am not disputing that George W. Bush stole elections from both Al Gore in 2000 (Florida) and John Kerry in 2004 (Ohio), the truth is that--especially in 2000--the vote-count was razor-thin close. Ridiculously close. Close enough that the only way for him to really win was to steal it.
But you see, it didn't HAVE to be that close now...did it?
Because as I recall, especially in 2000, what I heard was many many disgruntled Democrats such as Michael Moore and legions of others, claim that they didn't like Al Gore's middle-of-the-roadness as they saw it. They thought he was betraying liberal ideals. They thought he might even be TRIANGULATING. And they were pissed, really pissed.
So they decided to teach the Democratic party a lesson.
Yeah, I know you think the Hillary supporters came up with that one all on their own, but sorry. We've seen it before.
Everybody knew--I mean EVERYBODY--that there was no way Ralph Nader and his "Green" party could possibly win the elections of 2000 and 2004. Even he set as his highest goal, 5% of the total vote.
But he kept yammering on and on about how there really was no difference between the Democratic and Republican parties...Remember that?
Or are you too young? Because if you are, please allow me to enlighten you.
His main premise was that major party politics was so corrupted by big corporations and so much alike in their basic platforms (uh-huh) that the only way to REALLY change politics was to elect a third-party candidate, a true Independent, which is what he presented himself as being.
And all these disgusted, disgruntled liberals decided hell with it...I'm tired of seeing the Democrats tack to the center. They can't count on my vote, the corporate hacks. I'm voting for Nader.
That'll show 'em, you said.
I heard you. Don't deny it.
So you taught the "centrist" Democrats a real lesson there didn't you?
Nader received almost three million votes in the 2000 election. Estimates are that 40% of those votes would have gone to Gore. I think that is a low-ball estimate, but to be fair, I'll go with it.
In Florida, the key state, Nader received 97,488 votes. If only 40% of those went to Gore, that would still be 38,995 votes, which would have been enough to give Gore the state, since the final count, conducted by a nonpartisan newspaper after the Supreme Court decision, gave Bush Florida by only 537 votes. So Gore still would have won by well over 38,000 votes in Florida--and that's not even counting the rest of the 1,160,000 votes nation-wide that represent the modest 40% of Nader's votes that would have gone to Gore had he not run.
(More, if you think 40% is low, and I do.)
And if THAT had happened...Well, Bush couldn't have stolen the election then, because he'd've had to own the secretaries of state in a whole helluva lot more states than just Ohio and Florida...wouldn't he?
So...I've got a question for all you idealistic Nader-voters and the younger 2008 counterparts:
HOW'S THAT WORKIN' OUT FOR YA?
You made your ideological point. You protested by voting for a man you knew could not be elected. And we got George W. Bush, who has proceeded to destroy everything you and I ever believed in--law by law, war by war, preserved wilderness by preserved wilderness, hurricane by hurricane, Supreme Court justice by Supreme Court justice.
People who complain that they will protest-vote for McCain because their candidate didn't get the nomination, or who complain that they will no longer support Obama because he voted for or against something that, earlier, he had voted against or for, are highly idealistic--make that--illogical, because of two reasons.
ONE: He won't be able to do ANYTHING except vote on bills in the Senate if he is not elected, period.
And in this election, he can't get elected without the Independent vote. McCain is the only Republican candidate with a tinker's chance in hell of getting Independent voters, and he is already Roving himself up to snatch those folks into the Republican fold.
In 2004, Bush took a 50-plus-1 majority and used it as a MANDATE to do as he pleased after four years of, well, doing as he pleased.
The results have been horrific for our country.
Already they are painting Obama as a flaming liberal so far to the left he's practically a socialist, because they know that Independents are moderates by nature...CENTRISTS, if you will. Independents and disgruntled or moderate Republicans fear extremists on either side, and as Bush/Rove have proven time and again...as an electorate...they are easily fooled.
And TWO: So many of our electorate is too young to know what it means to have a functioning Congress that actually works together to get things done. There was a time when congresspeople and senators would argue bitterly on the House or Senate floor, then get together afterward and go out for drinks, where they would hammer out compromise on legislation before the body. There were many close friendships between political rivals.
THIS is how we got landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act. Don't assume that because we had a Democratic president then and a Democratic congress that it was all some sort of kubaya cakewalk, because it was not. Conservative Dems and Republicans lined up against liberals all the time.
But what was understood was that, without compromise, THERE IS NO GOVERNMENT.
There HAS to be pragmatism in politics in order to get anything done.
And when you have pragmatism...then you have a situation where conservatives and liberals will not be happy because the bill that results is not exactly what either of them wants.
But it will be a bill.
When Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay and their cronies came in with their so-called "Contract With America," they threw out all that. It was idealism all the way down, with ideologues controlling the agenda AND the media message.
Over the course of the years, moderates of both parties were forced out, and we were left with GRIDLOCK. Opponents on either side of the aisle screaming at each other and MONTHS going by with nothing getting done on ANYTHING. Literally calling one another names on the floor. Regarding rivals not as opponents, but as ENEMIES.
This is what happens when ideologues rule. Rigidity. Inflexibility. Inability to compromise.
I've even invented a little word for it: NADERISM.
Obama has stated repeatedly that the bills he has agreed to vote for now are not the same bills he opposed earlier. Many of the details he did not like have been removed. And no, he's not happy with them as they stand. But he knows that if he takes one ideological stance after another during this campaign--lining himself up solidly with idealistic liberals hungry for their shot--he will alienate millions of voters who will worry that an Obama administration would come in and sweep away the American way of life in a dramatic change they're not comfortable with.
He promises change. And he will deliver change.
But he can't do that if his own party drags him down.
If you prefer Naderism to pragmatism, you are being, well, unrealistic. It is unrealistic, first of all, to expect him to even get elected in the first place, and it is highly unrealistic to assume that even with a Democratic congress and senate that he will get everything he asks for if he does so along ideological lines.
Not all Democrats are the same as every other Democrat, and plenty of them come from Red states where they're hanging on for their political lives. They will compromise when asked--as they did on the new G.I. Bill--but when rammed up against the wall, they will bow their necks and stiff out their arms as surely as the worst conservative out there.
Baby-steps, boys and girls. Baby-steps.
I've read so many blogposts and op-eds calling into question Obama's principles and moral stamina, accusing him of triangulating and calculating and betraying all we hold dear in order to get elected.
"We thought he was different!" they whine.
He is different. But he is not stupid.
Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold, for example, are fine senators, and they can afford, politically, to stand on principle when it comes to the FISA bill, among other things.
After all, they aren't running for president.
Dodd WAS running the last time he filibustered FISA, but he's not running now, why? He couldn't get the votes. It is no reflection on the man; I am a big fan of his--BUT, in the pragmatic world of politics, you HAVE to do some calculations on occasion if you truly want to get elected.
You have to make some sacrifices. You have to back down once in a while. You have to be willing to compromise at some point. This is the real world of politics.
Am I saying that you should never show political courage? Of course not. But you have to pick your battles. You have to weigh, in your own soul, which battles mean the most to you and which you would be willing to fight even if it cost you the presidency.
Recently, political enemies have accused Obama of compromising on his promise to end the war. He is not and he has not. He is making a realistic assessment of the situation as it exists, but he will not back down on bringing the war to an end, period.
He will back down--for now--on FISA. He believes that there are safeguards in the new bill to strengthen it. Critics say they are not strong enough. Maybe not. But if he is elected president, then those safeguards will at least be ENFORCED.
This is the real world of politics. There is always room for idealism and ideals, of course. But at some point along the line, we've got to GOVERN.
Half of the country does not agree with the liberal point of view. If we want to get anything done in this government other than curses hurled across the aisle, that has got to be taken into consideration. THEY are going to have to compromise. WE are going to have to compromise. Some on both sides will never be happy, no matter what.
But the vast majority of people in this country WILL.
And that, my friends, is a democracy.
So grow up. Forget about protest-votes or withdrawing your support from our candidate.
Put your real-world glasses on, and vote for the man who really will bring about change, but only if he gets elected first...and then, he'll do it bit by bit.
Pragmatically.
But he WILL do it eventually, and that is what we all want in the long run...isn't it? |
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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It's funny how happy news can make you cry.
My nephew, Capt. Troy Mills, F Co. commander, 52nd Inf., a Stryker Brigade, who served 15 months in the Diyala Province, has returned home safe and sound and in one piece, and I thank God for it, yet again.
This marks the first time that we have not had a Mills family member deployed in a combat operation in Iraq since the war began, although Troy thinks he may have to return eventually for another year.
For each deployment of each young man, I sent a funny card stuffed with jokes and cartoons every single week, and Care packages as often as I could, crammed mostly with food and oddments like insect repellant or glove liners, depending upon the season.
Christmas boxes, too. Many of them.
Our family deployments have marked the arc of the war.
When my nephew Mike was first deployed with the Marines as an enlisted "grunt", with the Third Battalion Seventh Marine at the beginning of the war, he said that when they were out on patrol, children would run out from the schools and wave at them.
When he returned the next year, the children did not come out to greet them.
By the third deployment, he said the kids would come out of the schools and throw rocks at the 3/7 Marines as they passed.
Each successive deployment was more bloody and horrific than the one before. One incident was particularly tough for Mike, when on a foot patrol, a buddy of his at the rear was blown up by a roadside bomb that Mike had just passed safely.
"I didn't see it," he agonized, blaming himself for something that was, most surely, not his fault.
The buddy survived, but was badly hurt and spent many months recovering. He never blamed Mike.
My son's two deployments were also almost too grim to describe, beginning with the Battle of Fallujah in November of 2004, which was the worst battle the Marines had seen since Khe Sanh. More of the highest combat honors available in the military were rewarded to Dustin's unit, the Third Battalion, Fifth Marine, than has been awarded to the entire United States military. The 3/5 was also there to provide security in the Anbar province during the first elections in January 2005.
When they entered Fallujah, one of the things my son's platoon came upon was torture chambers used by insurgents on kidnap victims--horror chambers bathed in blood. They were able to rescue two innocent, barely alive Egyptians chained to the wall before they documented the place and then blew it to smithereens.
They also discovered houses located in residential areas packed to the ceiling with explosives, and weapons and explosive caches stockpiled in mosques and schools.
They were back the next year, which was one of the more deadly and demoralizing deployments the unit ever saw, with IEDs blowing up vehicles every single time they went out on patrol, including one driven by my son. He was medivacced out, then sent back to battle.
Dustin's unit also participated in helicopter missions--late-night forays many miles out in the desert, where a platoon would be dropped off in the dead of night, hump it to some village in the middle of nowhere, and conduct raids to round up terrorists and insurgents responsible for so much death and destruction, not just to American military, but to their own people.
Also during that deployment, another 3/5 platoon discovered and freed Jill Carroll, an American Christian Science Monitor reporter who was being held hostage.
During both deployments, the Marines slept in abandoned bulidings mostly, or out in the streets or the desert, going weeks without showers or hot meals or anything more than two-minute Sat-phone calls home. (Mike's unit, the 3/7, enjoyed similar happy comforts.)
My nephew Mike completed his service about a year ago, and my son did the same a few months ago. Both of them endured unimaginable harrassment because they refused to re-enlist. During Mike's last deployment, after he'd been through so much and fought so bravely and so well, in his last few weeks in Iraq, he was relegated to an army base to pick up trash, simply because he refused to re-enlist. Dustin endured similar humiliations, but left the service at the rank of sergeant.
Neither one EVER wants to see that country again.
But meanwhile, Dustin's unit, the 3/5, recently deployed for a FOURTH time to Iraq, back to the Anbar.
This deployment, however, was different. Because the insurgents who used to kill them decided to take money instead, NOT to kill them, there were very few violent incidents.
The Marines helped to build schools and so on. But I can tell you that, for the young officers who'd sent home so many of their men in body bags on previous deployments--they had to swallow a lot of bile in order to make nice to the people who'd been responsible.
But for the enlisted, as Dustin's buddies told him, it was "boring."
Recently, the 3/5 returned to Pendleton without a single lost Marine, thank God.
God bless those boys.
Our sons' dangerous deployments to war has profoundly changed both my sister-in-law Kay, and myself. She has dedicated herself to supporting the troops in every way possible. For one thing, she's active in the Dallas U.S.O., which shows up at DFW airport every Sunday afternoon, seeing off army troops who are deploying. They provide Care packages with phone cards and tell the boys, "Call your mama as soon as you arrive safely.") And they're there when the troops return home, cheering and waving flags.
She also attends the funeral of every soldier or Marine buried in the Dallas area. She's sent out literally thousands of Care packages, and writes many condolence letters to bereaved mothers and wives, often visiting them if she can.
Her politics are very conservative, and we have clashed from time to time, but we are sisters of the soul, bound together by an agony no one else can possibly understand who has not endured it, and that link will be with us forever.
Like my sister-in-law, I was changed too, but unlike her--though I supported the troops in every way I knew how--I could not support the war they were being forced to fight. I have dedicated my life and talents to ending this war and bringing our men and women out of harm's way.
Along the way, I set aside a career. I earn no money doing this. But none of that matters, not if my small voice can join the gathering chorus of shouts to end this travesty of a war.
My son and nephews know where I stand. Dustin has always been supportive--he bought me this computer with part of the combat pay he brought home from his first deployment to Fallujah, and as the war has dragged on, he's become my biggest cheerleader.
With my nephews, I've avoided any talk of politics, except for teasing, such as, "I'm praying for you honey. We'll see if God listens to a Democrat." And during the primaries, I put in a plug or two for Obama. Other than that, I just support them and the fine job they are doing and have done under impossible circumstances.
My nephew Troy's situation was considerably different from his cousins', but no less dangerous in its way. For one thing, he's army, not Marines, and for another, he is a captain, a company commander as part of a Stryker Brigade. Thanks to Bush's so-called "surge," his unit had to deploy a month early, before they'd even had their desert training, and two weeks after they arrived, their deployment was extended to 15 months.
Even though he was an officer, there was to be no luxury for Troy either, since Petraeus's plan to take troops off of big bases and disperse them throughout the population. So, like the Marines, they holed up in abandoned buildings.
Once again, I shipped off cards and Care packages stuffed with food. And once again, I checked in with another mother, to see how she was doing, offer encouragement and prayer. We combat moms have each others' backs.
His mom, Charlotte, though, is a military wife. She's pretty tough. We all are, now.
Even as the Anbar was calming down for the Marines, though, the Diyala, where Troy was, was heating up--mainly because it is mixed Sunni-Shiite, with a great deal of cross-violence as well as attacks on American troops.
And Troy, like all the Mills men before him, is a hands-on soldier. Not for him a desk, anyway. He went out with his guys every day, seeking out weapons caches and so on. But he also had responsibilities, not just to his men, but to try and settle disagreements between tribes and warlords and neighborhoods, and to offer help and what services he could. He had to be a soldier AND a diplomat.
He said, when he came home, that he felt bad for the Iraqis, because they didn't have the option of "going home" to creature comforts, but would have to endure grinding poverty for years to come.
But as with the Marines, there were ambushes and IEDs, and those Strykers aren't invincible.
I haven't yet had a chance to talk to Troy--he's up in Washington state--so I don't know if he lost any men. I do know that he re-enlisted. His father, after all, retired at the rank of Brigadier General in the army Special Forces, and his twin brother, Travis, is active-duty with the Special Forces. (He's been deployed in the past to Afghanistan, and to hot spots all over the world. Like Troy, Travis re-enlisted, and recently, assumed a company command of his own.)
I am so proud of all our young Mills men, who have each acquited themselves with courage, honor, grace, and dignity.
Although you hear of a few bad apples who make the news with "war crimes," you must never forget that for every bad soldier or Marine, there are literally thousands who, like my son and nephews, didn't just do their jobs with honor, but also did everything they could to help the Iraqi civilians who crossed their paths.
Most people don't realize that, when a suicide bomb goes off in Iraq, as it does dozens of times a day, the injured people receive care, many times, by American military doctors and hospitals, free. Children are often flown to the States, surgery is performed, and they are flown home.
There are many acts of kindness that take place every day between American troops and the Iraqi people. Polls have shown mixed emotions among the populace. Most want us to leave, but also, most are afraid. They know that the Americans do protect them, as best they can. I want this war to end more than anything, but even I know that.
And I have yet to speak to an American soldier or Marine who has not said that he felt badly for the Iraqi people. For instance, when searching a home, if the women and children are frightened and crying, they feel bad about that. They don't want to hurt people if they don't have to. And if they can help, they're glad to do it.
Don't believe everything you see in the movies about the American warrior. They are fierce fighters when they have to be, no doubt about it, but they are also our mother's sons, and nine-tenths of them never lose their kind souls.
Our family has been blessed beyond measure that each one of our young men has returned from war safe, in one piece, and of relatively sound mind.
I won't kid you. It hasn't been easy for my son and my nephew Mike. They both have nightmares, headaches, bouts of depression and anxiety and other problems related to the horrors they have witnessed and the physical demands on their bodies, but they have not shown any serious emotional difficulties.
This has to do in large part, I think, because my husband and his brother, the boys' Uncle Travis (not to be confused with the younger, who was named for him), both saw some serious combat in Vietnam. My husband, Kent, brought home a Bronze Star for valor, and Travis, who was also special forces, was shot up and left for dead by Viet Cong in his second deployment.
But these men have gone on to live productive, active, and successful lives. Around the Mills dinner table at big family gatherings, war stories fly, and they are always presented as funny no matter how harrowing.
One typical exchange: My daughter, Jessica, asking her Uncle Travis, "Why do you have two Purple Hearts?" And Travis, grinning, wisecracking, "Because I kept gettin' up and he kept shootin'!"
So these boys have grown up seeing that, no matter how bad it might have been in war, you can survive and thrive and get past it.
As my husband explained to Dustin, "You don't get rid of your demons. You just learn to cage them up."
Returning from their own war, these young men have also had an invaluable group of family mentors, should they need to talk to anyone, and I thank God for that, too.
The hardest part, I think, for Dustin and Mike has been reassimilating into a society in which the war is, for the most part, forgotten.
Here is one typical exchange Dustin had with one well-meaning redneck:
Redneck: "A helicopter ride would be soooo cool!"
Dustin: "Aw, it's not so great."
Redneck: "You've ridden on one?"
"Yeah."
"When? On a tour or something?"
"No. I was in the military."
"Which branch?"
"Marines."
"Oh. Did you go to war?"
"I was in Fallujah."
"Is that in Eye-Rack?"
"Yes."
"Didja kill anybody?"
(No comment.)
"Aw man, those ragheads oughta be glad I didn't go over there by God! I'd'a killed 'em ALL, man!"
(Silence.)
Job interviews can go either way. Even if Dustin tries to downplay his military service, he has to put it on a resume to explain four years out of the workforce. He has discovered that even the most well-meaning Human Resources directors are alarmingly ignorant about the war. Many do not know that Fallujah is in Iraq, much like the redneck. Many are dismissive, one or two even hostile.
One said, "I don't give a damn what you did in the war. It's not going to make a damn bit of difference here."
The problem with that is that Dustin had not mentioned the war; just that he'd been in the service. He never did figure out the man's problem, nor did he take the job.
Right now, he's watching the new G.I. Bill pingpong its way through Congress. If it passes, he may go back to school. (He has a degree in Psychology from Texas A&M.)
Mike has tried going back to school a couple of times; it hasn't worked out. Most likely, I expect, it has to do with the fact that, in college, he is surrounded by children, when at 22, he is a hundred years old. They're both looking for a fit in life, and their older vet family members tell them not to worry, that it takes about a year or so to adjust to being out of the military and away from war.
The big difference between Dustin and Mike and their older vet family members, though, is that this is the first time in history that these boys have to worry about being yanked out of civilian life and suddenly sent BACK to war. And that bears heavily on their minds.
But for now, at the Mills house, we celebrate another joyous reunion, and we thank God, with all our hearts.
And we cry happy tears.
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| Posted by Deanie Mills at | | | |
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"I don't wanna fly anymore, Doc. I've flown 35 missions, but Cathcart's raised the number to 50 before you can rotate out."
"I can't ground anyone just because they ask me to."
"Can you ground anyone who's crazy?"
"Of course I can. There's a rule that says I can ground anyone who's crazy."
"I'M crazy!"
"How do you know?"
"Ask anyone...They all say I'm crazy."
"I tell you who's crazy. He's crazy. Anyone has to be crazy to keep flying after all the close calls he's had."
"Why can't you ground HIM?"
"I can, but first he has to ask me."
"That's all he's gotta do to be grounded?"
"That's all."
"Then you can ground him."
"No...There's a catch."
"A catch?"
"Sure. Catch 22. Anybody who wants to get out of combat isn't really crazy, so I can't ground him."
"Okay. Let me see if I've got this straight. In order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy, and I must be crazy to k | | | | |
