[Peace-discuss] Ruminations from Maine on July 4

[Morton K. Brussel]

Summer relief.  --mkb

Published on Saturday, July 9, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Oh, Say, Can You See?
by Christopher Cooper

On this Fourth of July I did not barbecue a beast. Not a cow, not a  
pig. No, nor even a chicken or chickens or parts thereof, a scant six  
weeks from egg to grill, to serve and be served. I did not attend a  
parade. I find them boring. If I want to see a fire truck, I'll visit  
my friend the Chief. I confess I did not think about the beach all  
day. I did pull some weeds and pile some mulch and grind through a  
small fraction of my acreage gone to hay from rain and neglect,  
hoping to reclaim enough lawn near the road to appear at least  
marginally worthy of my corner of the American Dream to passing  
tourists.
I heard “The Stars And Stripes Forever” on the radio, but,  
inescapably rooted in the culture of my low-class youth, as surely as  
“The William Tell Overture” draws from my throat a hearty “Hi-Ho  
Silver!”, so did I use the occasion of this stirring patriotic march  
to remind my loyal doggies that we must always be kind to our web- 
footed friends on the very sensible and humane ground that “a duck  
may be somebody's mother.”
Nowhere on the property, my motor vehicle or my person did I display  
those stars and stripes. Congress is working toward its latest  
iteration of an anti-flag-desecration Constitutional amendment, and  
with the Republicans running the show and most Democrats playing  
parlor poodle there's an excellent chance we'll get it this time.  
Then those few of us who think we might better employ our time  
wondering and worrying about the desecration of the Constitution than  
any banner or symbol will find abundant diversion in bringing suit  
against redneck teenage girls in red white and blue halter tops and  
preschoolers who drop their cheesy Chinese-made flags-on-a-stick in  
the gutter when the chamber of commerce candy-flinging float motors by.
So at least I mowed. That, surely is a good, God-fearing suburban  
American pastime for any man on a summer afternoon. And in Maine in  
July mowing means battling deer flies. They are my favorite biting  
insect. I appreciate their large size, slow speed and direct  
engagement. They do not steal up to stab the backs of my arms and  
legs as mosquitoes do, nor do they crawl on my face in great numbers,  
the tactic of the blackfly. Deer flies wobble close, land on my arm  
or head, and about half the time find themselves there squashed flat.  
By me. Even as I mow. Even as I dream up these essays. I have never  
killed the legendary Seven With One Blow, but I am satisfied with my  
record.
Over the years, of course, deer flies have continued to prosper and  
to attack in apparently undiminished number and with equal vigor,  
despite the considerable toll I have taken. I hate them; I throw all  
my resources into assaulting those I can smite; they attack as ever.  
And, despite my fifty per cent kill ratio, enough get through my  
crude country Star Wars shield to cause me pain, to make me bleed, to  
itch, to scratch. This campaign is never ending. But it's worth it.
President George W. Bush asked us to consider whether the deaths of  
over seventeen hundred American men and women in Iraq (so far) has  
been “worth it.” He then spent the balance of his speech assuring his  
captive audience at Fort Bragg and those few citizens able to endure  
his third-grade-reading-lesson cadence that it is not only worth the  
death and dismemberment and anguish, but that “we will stay in the  
fight until the fight is won.” Now, I have a good ear and a  
reasonably facile mind, and some part of every day I engage the  
English language for good purpose, but by the end of that speech I  
will admit I could not well sort out which references were  
specifically to the war in Iraq and which to the concurrent if more  
amorphous “War on Terror.” This was probably deliberate on the part  
of White House speech writers.
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ruminated that he expected the Iraq war  
might require another ten or twelve years to conclude. To “win.” Vice  
President Cheney assured us recently that the Iraq insurgency is “in  
its last throes.” That's good news, to be sure, and Mr. Cheney,  
although venal to a fault, is not stupid. (Mr. Rumsfeld seems only  
predictably stupid, in an Al Haig kind of way. Mr. Bush's  
intelligence speaks for itself.) So, a decade or so of last throes  
should net us several thousand more dead soldiers (and tens of  
thousands of maimed and brain-addled, one of several as-yet untold  
tales of this popular little war).
Popular? Very, until recently. You remember. By last week, though,  
over half the persons polled thought it had been “a mistake.” Still,  
an almost equal per centage thought we should stay there and keep  
doing some version of what it is we've been doing that got seventeen  
hundred and fifty boys and girls blown up. This will change.  
Eventually polls will show a majority willing to leave before “the  
job is done”, before “the rise of democracy” is complete. Then we'll  
probably elect some smarmy zero like Joe Biden to preside over our  
extraction. Then the Republican fund-raising apparatus can work the  
Internet and direct mail with the spectre of a “Liberal” in the White  
House. Oh, how I wish! When did we last see a liberal at large?
Candidate Biden doesn't, in fact, disagree with the invasion, the  
lies on which it was predicated, or the need to “win.” About all I  
could discern from his public comments recently is that he, Joe  
Biden, President Biden, would have a more effective plan for  
prosecuting the quagmire than does the current officeholder.
So holidays roll by. And have you noticed they're all militarized  
holidays now? When I was a boy we took flowers to the graveyard for  
our departed family members on Memorial Day. This year, you'd have  
thought only soldiers ever died and got buried if you watched the  
news coverage. But I do speak too soon, I know. The war must roll on,  
in fits and starts and car bombs and helicopter crashes for a few  
more months or a year or two. We remember that the country turned  
against the Vietnam War. We forget how long it took for the center to  
turn. And the right was not then the power it is now, nor the  
military-industrial complex so smoothly and massively integrated, nor  
the press so derelict or outright bought.
I wish the men in Washington who so doggedly insist that we're  
delivering something they call “Freedom” to a people that did not ask  
for it and who appear to resent its imposition were not mostly  
millionaires. It's one thing to tell the public how great a job our  
young people are doing at war (I do not doubt that most of them work  
hard and try to do right as they know it.) It's another, harder thing  
to have your own son or daughter, just out of high school and looking  
for a job better than Wal Mart or Wendy's, enlist because a slick  
recruiter propositioned him or her with a whole lot of talk about  
“money for college” and very few tours of VA rehabilitation hospitals.
And speak to us of “collateral damage”, Mister Rumsfeld. Reassure us  
that it's “worth it.” Tell us about the “regrettable loss of civilian  
lives.” Use numbers, please. Estimates (almost never reported in U.S.  
News reports and ignored by the Bush administration) range from  
fifteen thousand to over a hundred thousand. The British medical  
journal The Lancet reported last October that between our massive air  
strikes and a continuing “climate of violence” more than a hundred  
thousand civilians have been killed. One can guess how many injured,  
and how available or effective medical care has been. The risk of  
death for civilians, The Lancet said, is now 158 times higher than  
before we invaded. Mission accomplished.
If you don't go after the grass, it takes over. If you don't attack  
the lies, the misdirection, the sleazy language, it proliferates and  
corrupts. Sometimes all you can do for your country, for yourself, is  
to say what you see. Even on a patriotic holiday. Especially on a  
patriotic holiday.
I'll continue to mow. The deer flies will be thick for a few weeks  
yet, and I'll annihilate as many as I can.
This article was published in The Wiscasset Newspaper (Wiscasset,  
Maine) on July 7, 2005.

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