#232 – Dick Bernard: Politics on a Stick

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Yesterday was the opening of the Minnesota State Fair, and like much of Minnesota, my State Fair gene kicks in, and I’ll make my way there, zombie-like, making my usual rounds, having my usual “health foods”, and come home again. It’s an annual ritual. I can’t help myself….
Every two years, coincident with the State Fair, comes the intensity of partisan politics and the endless parade of political advertisements on radio, television, and fliers in mailboxes. With large populations to reach, candidates must advertise. It is an essential.
But as “Nutrition” is to Whatever-is-on-a-Stick at the Fair, so “Truth” is to Political Advertising. Nutrition and Stick Food are oxymorons; so, often, are Truth and Political Advertising.
In politics, the intention is to make oneself look as good as possible; the other side as bad as possible, while seeming to tell the truth. This is at its most perverse from the assorted political action committees that have high-sounding names, but represent very narrow constituencies who prefer not to be known to the public.
Oddly, “we, the people”, not only enjoy dishonesty, we seem to crave it. What an odd way to pick our leaders.
Caveat Emptor.
Most people are willfully ignorant of politicians and the position they take, and politicians are wary of the dilemmas of honest politics, so I guess it is wishful thinking to imagine a more enlightened day when political argument can be intense, and those who participate can be trusted to take honest positions without need to trash their opposition or misrepresent their own…. But I can dream.
In the meantime, for those who do care, and do participate, I think it is important to make every effort to get to know the candidates, particularly the ones you are inclined to support, as well as possible, and to actually take the time to work for them in the ways that are available: money and time being the primary ones.
There are excellent candidates out there, well worth supporting. Often times their positive attributes are buried underneath a fog by their opponents, usually in negative political attack ads. Best to simply dismiss these and seek out some semblance of truth from other sources, which are available. And to judge the candidate not only one or two favorite issues of yours, but to consider the reality of the tensions they have (or will have) to daily experience in faithfully representing their diverse constituencies.
Personally I do think there is a major and substantive distinction between parties in this instance, but this blog is not a place to highlight that distinction.
I do offer, however, a historical picture of who controlled the government in Washington D.C. from 1977 to the present: Congress makeup 1977 on001. I felt compelled to do this chart in April of 2009, two and a half months into the Presidency of Barack Obama, because, even at that time, Obama was being labeled a failure by his enemies.
As I say: Caveat Emptor.

#227 – Dick Bernard: The last truck out….

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Last night about 6:55 p.m. local time I turned on the TV to watch some evening news.
Rather than what I expected, I was watching the last combat units pulling out of Iraq into neighboring Kuwait. I sat transfixed by this until near 9 p.m. my time, and (if I recall rightly) 3:53 a.m. local time in Kuwait, August 19, 2010, when the last immense and other-worldly combat vehicle went through the border gate, which then closed behind it.
I felt I was witnessing history in the making.
At this moment, 5 a.m. local time on August 19, 2010, there is little on the internet news behind this screen I’m typing on. I’m sure this will rapidly change. NBC-MSNBC had the exclusive reporting rights on this one apparently because they possessed the technology to instantly cover the breaking story, which was secret until it actually happened.
Now the torrent of commentary and controversy will begin along all sorts of predicted trajectories. This was, after all, a withdrawal of the last specifically designated combat troops in Iraq, and 50,000 American troops remain in Iraq, and Afghanistan is the issue du jour. (Area map with Minnesota superimposed for scale is Iraq environs ca 2005001.)
But it is an historic event ranking, for me, with the time I stopped along highway 2 in northern Minnesota to listen to the account of “the Eagle has landed” on the moon (July 20, 1969); the early afternoon when I was in a science lab in Hallock MN when the PA announcement came that President Kennedy had been shot (November 22, 1963); the evening in 1991 when the car radio brought news that the U.S. had invaded Iraq in Desert Storm (January 16, 1991) (March, 1991, note from a GI there, to me, is Soldier letter 1991001); Afghanistan Oct 7 2001, and Baghdad (March 20, 2003); the iconic last helicopter out of Saigon (April 29, 1975)….
I will especially be watching to see how (not if, but how) the very odd “coalition” of the Far Right and Far Left will position on this particular historical development.
Neither Far Left or Far Right seem to have any time for President Obama these days, for precisely opposite reasons. They have joined forces in driving down his poll numbers – it is a perfect example (in my opinion) of the danger of drawing false conclusions from seemingly obvious data in polls. Lately “the fur has been flying” over a comment about the “professional Left” from the White House Press Secretary. Since I mostly “hang” with people over on the dark (left) side, and indeed watched last nights development on the news program of one of these “professional Lefties”, I’ve seen commentaries ad infinitum about that supposed slight a few days ago.
A friend, a couple of days ago, caught this unholy alliance idea pretty well, in a personal comment on another issue: “The truly interesting thing is how the left and the right see Obama…. One sees him as a “communist”, the other sees him in cahoots with Wall Street. Based on that alone he must be doing something right.”
Ironically (my opinion), President Obama is the voice of moderation, seeking some stability in this almost collapsed nation of ours, and this requires navigating extraordinarily rough seas.
So, I’ll watch and see how this all plays out.
Tonight, just by happenstance, I’m moderating an inaugural and small community conversation brought together by five of us to try to get into civil conversation about issues of the day. It will be an interesting experiment, hopefully the first of many such conversations of people of differing feelings and beliefs. (We gather at Peaceful United Methodist Church on Steepleview Rd in Woodbury if you want to join us – 7 p.m.)
What I witnessed on TV last night wasn’t on our agenda for tonight.
Tonight it likely will be.
Stay tuned.
(NOTE: I have other commentaries on the general issue. Most recent is a commentary on Afghanistan. Simply print the word in the Search Box. War is another category.)

#202 – Dick Bernard: Why Are We a Ship Full of Fools?

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Thursday afternoon a friend stopped by to visit. He’d been to a wake at a nearby mortuary, paying respects to a long-time colleague who, he said, had few friends and almost no family. A kindly gesture.
We visited.
Jim is a fairly recent retiree from a career position in state government. I suppose somebody could call him a “bureaucrat”; some others wouldn’t even elevate him to that hated status. But he’s had a career inside the state system and he knows it very well. He also knows local politics, having been an elected city council member in his suburban community.
Our state like many others is grappling with huge budget issues. Recently the legislature (Democrat) avoided a special session showdown with our Governor (Republican-and-running-for-2012-GOP Presidential-nomination) by, as Jim put it, putting off catastrophic decisions until 2011. Either taxes must be raised, or draconian cuts made in needed services (meaning also, of course, cuts in personnel and/or their wages and benefits which in turn hurts the economy). But our formerly (ten years or more ago, I’d say, when negotiating differences meant something) responsible state government has again succumbed to political reality – getting elected in November.
Earlier in the day my wife had been to the hospital to visit our friend Annette who’d been “fired” from her job in early December. I put “fired” in quotes, because she was simply let go under the guise of being “fired”: She qualified immediately for unemployment, with no contest whatsoever from her former employer. She has not actively sought a job as she needed the surgery to work. She could not get the surgery until she qualified for a certain stop-gap insurance to cover the bill, which in turn she couldn’t qualify for until a month after her eligibility for another insurance plan (one she could not afford) ran out. (Yes, it is complicated, but it’s how I remember the scenario).
Thursday night I watched the news, part of which was the failure, once again, to get an extension of unemployment benefits through the U.S. Senate. The vote was to allow an up-or-down vote and avoid a filibuster. The senators call it “invoking cloture”. It takes 60 votes for cloture, in a 100 member Senate. Fifty-seven Democrats voted aye; forty Republicans and one Democrat voted nay, and the motion failed. There are so many issues, and filibusters are diversions that cannot be afforded. The politicians have their issue: “that’ll show those shiftless and lazy dolts who are feeding at the public trough – go out and get a job” (even if there’s no job to get). Jobs are the reason the stimulus is needed in the first place. (The excuse used by senators – and it is only an excuse – is that this will increase the deficit; they all know its actual effect will be the opposite, which is why the Republicans want it to fail. I wrote about this multiplier effect one year ago on this blog.)
The Republican strategy is the same as it has been from Day One of the Obama Presidency: make him fail, and in failure, enhance the prospect for Republican success in November. That 60-vote cloture rule is one of their main tools.
Blocking legislation is a good short-term political strategy…and we are fools to bite, but many of us are – at least that’s the Republican calculus to win in November.
That night we had a house guest while I watched the national news. He was one of our grandsons, whose Dad was working his second job.
His Dad is one of those who was laid off from a corporate job last March, and has taken a temporary job – “no more than a year” – with lower wages than he was earning, with the State of Minnesota*. His job seems to be intake phone calls from fellow-unemployed persons, including occasional ones contemplating suicide because they can’t find work. He is the first point of contact with the State, and he is to help them navigate the maze to possible assistance on their particular problem. It is hard work.
When the axe falls, as it will, on our state in January, his job will almost certainly be history. So will, likely, the usual possibility that even a temporary state job might lead to something more permanent. He has to work two jobs to survive, which cuts into his opportunity to seek other employment….
And we continue on, cruising on this Ship of Fools, justifying our short-sightedness and selfishness.
At some point, our ship will sink; it’s now rapidly taking on water. We seem not to care.
* – Subsequent to this post, I visited with my son-in-law: he’s one of 400 doing this job, and he receives over 100 phone calls per day. There is no down time.
A directly related post, by Paul Krugman in Monday’s New York Times, is here.
A followup post at this blog and on this topic is #203, here.

#198 – Dick Bernard: The President, BP, and Energy Policy

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I clicked on “publish” on #197 – Taking Responsibility and went to watch President Obama speak to the nation from the Oval Office Tuesday night.
The speech is short, well worth watching.
As I anticipated in #197, the instant analysis – and criticism – began immediately after the lights went down in the Oval Office.
I watched the speech on my favorite news outlet, and the fancy highly paid version of “armchair quarterbacks” or “sidewalk superintendents” weighed in immediately, slicing and dicing the Presidents every word and gesture and inflection.
I lasted about ten minutes, and left to do other things. There are better ways to spend ones time than listen to talking heads talk.
Then this morning the slicing and dicing continued on-line.
And I’m just paying attention to what President Obama’s “friends” are saying. I can imagine how his enemies are spinning this.
No doubt the President and his advisors were well aware going in that this would be a no-win kind of evening for him.
Everyone has their own particular grievance or expectation. Almost nobody truly believes that it is their problem to solve, or at minimum, most folks don’t consider themselves to have any clout beyond complaining to their friends and disciples.
My own interpretation of his brief, calm, direct remarks was, to borrow a suddenly publicly utterable word: “foks, if you want something to happen long-term, get off your collective a*sses and get to work. I can’t do it by myself.”
He wasn’t talking to his opposition: he knows they’re in it to have him fail, for their own political advantage.
He was talking to the tens of millions of us who said, a year and a half ago, that we wanted to be part of “Change we can believe in”. And the work has to be done locally and state by state, with local lawmakers, and state and national elected representatives we send to Washington.
Without our active involvement – and carping about a speech is not active involvement – our nation will continue the slide on the slippery slope to at best irrelevancy and at worst oblivion.
We cannot survive, living in the manner to which we have become accustomed, relying on the ever more elusive fossil fuels, found in ever more dangerous places, that we’ve gorged ourselves on over the last century.
I believe that most people, including those who hate Obama, know that we’re in a major crisis; that without major change we’re doomed.
Now is the time for us to act in our own self interest and help our nation change its far too long accepted self-destructive course.
President Obama advocated, last night, for moving away from our addiction to fossil fuels, and said it was possible, much like new-President John Kennedy said, years ago, that we could land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
I had just turned 21 when Kennedy made his “man on the moon” speech in May, 1961, and nobody believed him, but the goal was attained with an outpouring of national will, July 20, 1969*. Granted, Kennedy had fear – of Sputnik, and the Soviet Unions nuclear adventures – in his corner then; but our crisis. now, is even greater.
Change can happen with energy policy in this decade as well IF we work to make it so. We can’t wait.
* – I notice the YouTube link invites a re-direct to the BP channel – something I had heard about. Ah, the information age….

#197 – Dick Bernard: Taking Responsibility

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In an hour or so President Obama will deliver an address that will be closely watched world-wide. Afterwards, as he and his advisors know, every word (or lack of same), expression, inflection, will be analyzed and isolated to suit the purposes of endless numbers of observers, who will then cast judgment, positive or negative, on what he says or doesn’t say. This is how the game is played.
I’ll watch the address. That’s about it.
I choose to focus, rather, on some random events, starting with an e-mail from a friend about 9 this morning. This friend is in international business, an exporter of USA and Canadian food and feed grains and seeds. He said: “To be honest business is just terrible. I do not see how the world can avoid a double dip recession as consumption is down in all areas with inventories not moving as anticipated.”
My friend is an astute veteran international business man. What he observes is not some abstract thing. It’s where he lives, literally.
What he said this morning ties in, I think, with what the President faces tonight when the camera rolls at the White House.
From May 31 through June 7 we were on the road to a family wedding in Colorado. By the time we left on our trip, the President had accepted responsibility for taking care of the oil spill. When we got back, one of the first film clips we saw on evening news was of Elizabeth Cheney asserting on one of the Sunday newsmaker programs that since this thing happened on Obama’s watch, it was his responsibility. There was not any acknowledgment that her Daddy, the former vice-president who’s been silent as stone on this issue, might share some responsibility. Their behavior reminds me of something I once heard from an ordinary person: “Mom taught me never to apologize“.
President Obama did what we expect of him: take on our responsibility. The Cheney’s, on the other hand, did what we too often expect of ourselves: nothing.
Every now and then on our trip out west (we were two couples in a Prius) we talked about whether or not this 2500 miles was a frivolous trip. Even at a pretty amazing 40mpg, we wondered, should we be doing this.
Occasionally we’d ask business people about their business, and in each instance, business was down: fewer people travelling; those people spending less.
During the past week, we’ve now begun to hear the expected refrain from the British, whose pensions are in many ways depending on the economic health of the mega-corporation, BP. “Make the corporation responsible and it’s going to damage all of us“, so goes the refrain. I think it was yesterday that Haley Barbour, the political genius who’s Governor of Mississippi, seemed to begin to make the case that drilling ought to resume, regardless of what had just happened. After all, the saw goes, people need jobs. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”.
And so it goes. Personally, I’m inclined to be moved by my friends comment earlier in this post. If we can afford to do so – and most of us can – I think now is a time to put money into the economy so as to help allay a darker and deeper recession. Sure, make choices of where you spend that money, but best to put some of the treasure in the money bin into circulation. I won’t buy a bushel of my friends soybean seed, but the money multiplier does work. And we’re the base for this.
I’m glad we made our trip. So is my son and granddaughter and daughter-in-law. So are the motels we stayed in. So is the girl from Russia who waited on us at a restaurant in Wall SD.
President Obama will be on stage tonight. But everyone of us, in the wings, has our own important and constructive part to play.
For those interested, here’s a link to the White House, related to the Presidents address.

#189 – Dick Bernard: Navigating the Mean Streets of Activism, or Passivism….

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Thursday I had the opportunity to drive author Paul Loeb from place to place in Minneapolis. Paul had spoken the previous evening on the new revision of his best-selling book “Soul of a Citizen”, and as authors do when their new works are published, he was making the rounds, and we had a few minutes to chat. It was an interesting and stimulating afternoon. (The book is inspiring and stimulating. Check it out.)
I was a little late picking Paul up, and had an excuse. Right before I left home, the phone rang and a friend of my wife was on the other end. Cathy wasn’t home, so I was about to simply take a message, but the friend – let’s call her Joan – needed to give somebody a piece of her mind. Usually it would have been Cathy, who’s stuck with this friendship for years. Today it was me.
Joan, who I don’t know very well, works for a medical products corporation in a major city and is by all accounts pretty successful. I gather her salary is somewhere in the lower six figures; she has a couple of million in her investment portfolio, and it would be more except for some financial manager who made very bad decisions with her money some years ago. She’s never been married, and somebody has advised her that she needs a nest egg of $5 million to have a decent retirement…. She’ll probably make that goal, but she will not be satisfied with reaching it. So it goes. It’s Joan against the world; nothing will ever be enough.
But that wasn’t her litany on Thursday noon.
She had been at a meeting at Corporate that morning, and it was said that because of higher taxes as a result of the Obama Health Care Reform they were probably going to have to lay off people, and furthermore, new people she needed for her own department could not be hired. It’s Obama’s fault….
I told her I couldn’t agree with her, but I didn’t have time to get into an argument, since I was already running late.
I have no idea if she was telling me “facts”, or just her interpretation of what was said in the meeting. Similarly, I don’t know if the company spokespeople were telling facts, or just their interpretation of facts, for their own reasons. You never know.
Had she continued, I know she would have gotten into her favorite topics: teachers get paid too much and besides have three months paid vacation; welfare is disgusting – she works hard, and they don’t work at all; taxes are too high, and on and on and on. She is relentless.
Meanwhile, Paul Loeb was talking to another type of audience that could easily be said to be polar opposites of Joan. He was puzzled that progressives seemed to write off Obama as a failure after only a few months on the job; and worse, it seems that many feel that their only duty was to vote in a new President, and then leave the work up to he and the other politicians to accomplish, essentially, with little or no support.
In this unholy mess that is the United States of America, there are lots of people who are befuddled, some intentionally, and plenty of fools, oftentimes fooling themselves. Some of these folks we know pretty well: some are us.
We seem to expect that are simple solutions to complex problems, so Joan, who probably doesn’t even vote, is content to complain about her circumstances which are extremely good compared to most of her fellow citizens. That doesn’t make any difference to her.
And the beat goes on.

Paul Loeb at U of Minnesota April 22, 2010

#183 – Dick Bernard: The Politics of Energy, and Everything else

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“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Voltaire
Earlier today, my spouse asked me what I thought of President Obamas just-announced approach to energy policy. His administration is apparently open to new, but limited, off-shore drilling for oil, including it in a package of other (in my reading) more important initiatives. This is a strategy I’ve already heard being vigorously criticized: his proposal, it is said, will only represent a drop in the bucket solution for the huge energy problem our society faces; it’s the wrong approach; etc. Once again, it is suggested, he is deserting his base.
I see his strategy, coupled with other far more important proposals for things like increasing energy efficiency, etc., to be a very wise one. Rather than exposing weakness, he is, I feel, demonstrating strength. Rather than looking only at the short term, he is looking much further down the road. His position is the opposite of what many perceive it to be. He is pursuing a goal along the route of the possible, rather than the ideal.
He knows he is facing an opposition in the Congress which voted unanimously in opposition to a health care reform which included many elements they supported. Their unified “no” vote had only one principle behind it: to defeat (and hopefully weaken) the President. Now with passage of the initiative the truth is coming out, including the need of the opposition to re-calibrate its strategy, including trying to figure out how to refashion their unanimous opposition to the health care reform initiative into, somehow, making health care reform, including the bill which passed, seem like their own idea.
This is how the extremely hard ball game of national politics is played.
A while back I was commenting to someone about the reality I see in todays Washington, and Obama’s approach to it. President Obama comes from an organizing background, I observed. “People don’t understand Organizers; Organizers understand people.”
Changing the rules of engagement in the rough and tumble and very nasty game of contemporary politics in this country is a very tall order. Most everybody who cares is accustomed to a certain way of doing the business of politics, and has difficulty understanding that there might be another way to approach solving problems that threaten our very societies long term existence.
Perhaps it would be nice to just throw out what has been in place for years, and take a totally principled position for a truly alternative national policy. Politically, that just won’t work. Too many of us really do crave a “drill, baby, drill” approach to energy (and most everything else). We want rights without responsibilities or consequences. The present is all that matters; the future is somebody elses problem. About the only strategy that will work with a majority of our citizenry is an incremental approach, and that is, I believe, what the Obama administration is about.
I’m among those who think that our U.S. society is like a present day Titanic, racing full speed ahead into an iceberg and disaster, intentionally oblivious of the danger ahead.
Most of us don’t want to see that iceberg coming. At least there’s now someone in the pilot house working to change our course.
I’m glad for that.

#146 – Dick Bernard: Armies of One

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Wednesday of this week a good friend from the old teacher bargaining days, Paul, met me for coffee at a St. Paul restaurant. He, his wife and I talked about many things, and part of our time was about the raggedness of today’s political conversation in this country, even within “birds of a feather”.
Among other meanderings was the recollection of how difficult negotiations really is for those idealists who actually do the bargaining. Not only is there the obvious disparity in positions between the formal “sides” – in our case, labor and management; even more difficult was the internal “scrum” of priorities within the group we were charged with representing. Individuals and small special interest groups within the union made the process even more difficult…and this was totally off the visible screen for most. It could be brutal.
Yesterday, another good friend and I “talked” a bit on-line about how President Obama has done this first year in office. Jeff is in international business and the very nature of his work is constant negotiations, representing producers in this country in dealings with consumers in other countries. His is the same process that involved Paul and I, only a different venue.
Jeff and I bantered back and forth for a bit about the President’s performance, in baseball terms. “[He has] the “potential to hit .425 in Major League baseball…call me disappointed.” “Your response leads to a question: is there a common definition in this country about what is a political “hit” leading to the .425?” “People got excited with his promise…and promises…now he supports [something else].” “So, “People”? Some think he hit a double; others think he’s struck out; still others would toss him out of the game…it gets complicated really quickly, eh?”
I thought to myself: the baseball metaphor doesn’t work too well here.
Then, late in the afternoon came an out of the blue e-mail from a fellow I know only from e-mail, who I hadn’t heard from in a long time, whose common interest with me is genealogy and a cultural group newsletter I used to do. “Bonjour Dick…just curious…were you ever in the military?…if so, when and in what branch?” The question was completely out of his and my ordinary context. I answered the question in more detail than perhaps he expected: yes, U.S. Army, 1962-63, peacenik, etc., etc. Maybe I’ll hear from him today on what made him curious, maybe not.
The assorted “threads” above, plus others, got me thinking about the that old, odd Army recruiting phrase: “Army of One“, which at some point replaced “Be All You Can Be” and in turn was replaced in 2006 by “Army Strong“.
Having been in the Army, “Army of One” made absolutely no sense from an operational point of view. An “Army of One” would be an Army of Chaos. But at the time, it was probably the only effective way seen to get enough of our Nation of Individualists to volunteer for service: “I’ll come in, but on my terms” was their demand. That probably lasted through the first day or two of basic training and they learned the truth….
Here we are, in 2010, where we seem, too much, to be a “Nation of Ones”, regardless of ideology. The whole is much, much too complicated, so we tend to fixate on a single issue or aspect of the Whole, and make it our non-negotiable demand. As my negotiator friend and I learned long ago, in much smaller contexts, that kind of bargaining simply does not work. Sooner or later, a resolution for the whole needs to be found, that will also satisfy the other “side”. Absent that, chaos.
So, we elect a new President, and immediately challenge everything he does, every decision he makes, and even his supporters call him a failure because he didn’t single-handedly and immediately resolve all of the very real problems that were on his plate coming in.
I think President Obama understands this conundrum. We should too.

#130 – Dick Bernard: "the gods must be crazy"

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December 13, 2003, I arrived back from Haiti, all imbued with idealism, but pretty certain that Haiti’s democratically elected government would be deposed, though not sure how or by whom. I had met a lot of people who were standing by President Aristide, even though it was clear that his government was being starved out of existence, unable to really accomplish any of his goals for lack of resources. He and his government had been marked for extinction.
January 11, 2004, the St. Paul Pioneer Press printed a column of mine, which Common Dreams still archives, and which speaks for itself here.
As time went on, it became more and more clear to me that the United States, in alliance with Canada and France, was out to get rid of Haiti’s elected leader and his entire Lavalas party. This ultimately happened late at night February 29, 2004.
A week before the coup was accomplished in Haiti, distinguished Knight-Ridder senior military correspondent Joseph L. Galloway wrote a column appropriately headlined “If U.S. returns to Haiti, get the job done“. Essentially he endorsed the 1915 U.S. “solution” for Haiti, in which the U.S. Marines began their occupation and control of the country for 19 years “Good men and true, and they took and pacified the entire country with a loss of only three Marines killed and 18 wounded” was the essence of his story. He appeared to support the Bush administrations decision to restore democracy by (effectively) destroying the existing democracy (which he referred to as a dictatorship – interesting how words can ‘sing’.)
Haitians of course have a different spin on the reality of those 19 years from 1915-34, and all the years before and after, including the coup d’etat of February 29, 2004, and its fore- and after-effects. But who cares about that? Old news…. Most recently, Aristide’s Lavalas has been denied standing as a political party in upcoming elections for supposedly technical reasons.
The 2004 coup did not bring peace and prosperity to Haiti. Less than a month after President Aristide was safely out of the country, Haiti disappeared as news in the U.S.
In May, 2006, Mr. Galloway and I had a brief e-mail correspondence about the current situation in Haiti. He had just retired from Knight-Ridder, and said, after defending his earlier comments, that “I’ve been going to America’s wars for 41 years…from Vietnam 1965 to Iraq January, 2006. I am not going to study war anymore. Instead, I shall study peace.”
About Haiti, he said “what I said and meant [in the February 22, 2004, column] was that if we went in again we should be prepared to stay and help rebuild a nation and educate a new generation of Haitians to a different kind of politics and governance than they have endured for centuries now…nobody seems willing to invest what is needed to make Haiti something other than a nation of poor people ruled by a very tiny oligarchy.”
Truth be told, U.S. troops scarcely touched Haitian soil during and after the 2004 coup. Nation-destruction was accomplished by U.S. Aid to anti-government de-stabilization folks, while the legitimate Haitian government was economically starved to death.
After the coup, the United Nations, through “Peace-keeping” forces, became and remains the U.S. surrogate in Haiti. It is far too early to tell what changes in direction will come from the Obama administration after eight years of a Bush foreign policy. I have heard that there is now an immense embassy in Haiti, an enduring symbol of American pre-eminence in that still desperately poor country.
I bring this up, now, since most recently Mr. Galloway has argued against U.S. continuing engagement in Afghanistan (here). He is now extolled as a hero of sorts on the Left.
I would like to believe that his motives are pristine and sincere, that he ‘beat his sword into a plowshare” and “won’t study war no more”, but like the Kalahari Bushman who found an empty Coke bottle in the desert, and couldn’t conceive of what in the world it could mean, I’m not sure where (or if) what he says and what he means intersect. I feel like the Bushman and that Coke bottle on the desert floor: “the gods must be crazy”*.
What I see, now, as the “gods” are the “chattering class” – talking heads of all ideological stripes – who are attempting to establish their own version of reality. Left, Right, makes no difference whatsoever.
For now, Mr. Galloway is my sample worthy of study. And he’s not coming across as very real. He is highly respected, deservedly so. I’m hoping that he truly had a conversion of heart in 2006. (I tried to meet him in person in D.C. in May, 2006, but it was a close call…didn’t happen. I’ll hope to get this writing to him where he now resides.)
Meanwhile, I stand by my comments in my blog post on December 1, 2009. The ice is thickening here….
* – Some video clips from the 1980 film “The gods must be crazy” are available on YouTube, for anyone interested.

#124 – Dick Bernard: The Ice on the Pond

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In a couple of hours President Obama will deliver an important address on Afghanistan at The U.S. Military Academy at West Point NY. As is usual with these kinds of addresses, every body on every side knows everything about what is going to be said tonight, and is already, and will continue, to interpret what the address means from their viewpoint.
“The White House” knows this going in, and also knows essentially what the basically quiet “American people” are waiting to hear, and also what its long term objective is, and the President will deliver a carefully crafted and coherent message. In fact, the site of the speech, West Point, is part of the essential message: “we support our brave men and women who serve our country”. And it will be a genuine message.
I’ll watch the speech, and I’m interested in the words, but, truth be told, I’m far more interested in what is not so visible, in fact, what is not visible at all to most of us. It is what is below “the ice on the pond”.
In my neck of the woods, I have just begun to see the first ice forming on the ponds on my walking route. At this moment, it is still coming and going – the temperature has not been reliably below freezing*. Likely, permanent winter ice will happen soon and remain until sometime late in April, 2010. For about five months, we will not see water, other than the frozen shell which hides it.
Most of we citizens engage in a frustrating exercise of only watching the political “ice” from the shore. That is all we do (or are allowed to do). Only certain people are allowed out on that ice, to drill holes to ascertain how thick the ice is, etc. These people are political and media insiders, all with agendas of their own; often competing agendas. They shout out competing stories of what they see below the ice.
We spectators on the shore can see the ice. But we know little else, other than what we are told.
From my perspective, there is a lot of positive stuff going on below the apparently thickening of the ice in the war in Afghanistan (and in other arenas as well). The Obama administration is about making positive change.
Contrary to most of what I hear, I feel there are fresh ideas – fresh water – circulating under the visible ice. Every now and then little pieces of evidence surface, but I can sense that a change in direction is happening, slowly but surely.
I’ll listen to the Presidents words an hour or so from now. But mostly I’ll be watching for the usually subtle and quiet messages in the much longer term.
Positive change is happening. It just isn’t happening as fast as we would like. I’ll do what I can to help direct that change. That’s all I can do.
* – And speaking of change: I had a rule of thumb for years, here, that the first permanent snow of winter came in Thanksgiving week. This November, for the first time in memory, there was no measurable snow in this metropolitan area for the entire month. Evidence of climate change, or just nice fall weather?